Luke Sutherland, who led Long Fin Killie through a handful of always sonically intriguing albums in the latter half of the '90s, returns here with a different musical approach. His airy falsetto appears on only a handful of tracks, with the vocals delegated for the most part to two different female vocalists, Ruth Emond and Signe Høirup Wille-Jorgensen. Where Long Fin Killie's music was often percussive, sometimes angular or even harsh, Bows' songs typically arrive in a flurry of mandolins, a blanket of multiple saxophones, or a gauzy haze of harps, sometimes acoustic, sometimes sampled, often both. The dominant tones, then, are soft, enveloping; the percussion, both live and looped, takes on a muted, diffused sound. The songs are structured from shifting layers of repeated patterns with small variations, rather like a less rhythmically intense or frenetic version of Steve Reich or Philip Glass in the early '70s. The lovely packaging provides a visual analogy: print and image are built in palimpsest-like fashion from the jewelbox itself down through layers of translucent folded paper. Unsurprisingly, the overall effect of Bows (rhymes with "shows") is subtler than Long Fin Killie's, more mysterious and haunting. The epic "Girls Lips Glitter" is a good example, beginning with a repeated phrase on electric piano, one of Sutherland's vocal turns, and a bobbing bass. Without warning a hyper drum'n'bass-influenced percussion loop takes over, only to yield to the music of the opening section, accented this time by electric guitar harmonics. The drum'n'bass section returns in more subdued form, with the electric guitar idea providing a new layer of repetition. Parts drop in and out in dub-inspired fashion, and the song ends with the electric piano figure, this time slowed to about half-speed. Despite the repetition of individual elements, the layered totality never really repeats - and as a result, the song's eight minute length goes by quickly. While the elements of Bows' music aren't that new - along with the styles and approaches mentioned above, I can hear the influence of Björk's material and unsurprisingly Long Fin Killie itself - their combination doesn't sound much like anyone else, and Sutherland's oblique, cynical outlook is still appealingly in evidence in this very promising debut.

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