Arcades: Who's Most Lost (Rattle, digital outlets)

A highly unusual release from Rattle who, let's be honest, release quite a lot of highly unusual contemporary classical and improvised music.

That's their thing, really.

However here David Prior and Dugal McKinnon – who met at Birmingham Uni while doing PhDs in composition – offer a kind of avant-folk pop on this album which was originally released in 2011 but has been now put up on bandcamp.

It edges towards slightly downbeat and minimally realised songs on keyboards with quiet disruptive sounds from scratching, what sounds like tipsy oboe or strings and . . .

It is interesting – that loaded word which suspends judgement – and although they billed themselves as pop, alt-pop and art pop, they stand apart from your expectation of the shorthand which implies those categories.

There is certainly quiet beauty here (Loaves Are Wishes recalls Eno around the Before And After Science album with a bit of experimental Bowie's adept melodic changes thrown in), some uneasy pieces (the tickling electro-blip and ominous vocals of Deep Space), lovely and seductive post-folk (You Were Born Into This) and what might be a faltering Incredible String Band – without the exotic instrumentation – rehearsing new pieces (Cure for Vertigo, the 90 second Such Cold Hands).

It can be kinda cool, as on the title track.

But it does invert expectation and once too often ideas are undercooked or reaching for an interesting place just beyond the grasp (Crusoe in Hampstead Mews).

Yes, “interesting”, perhaps not as smart as it thinks it is but an album if you are prepared to be patient might sometimes woo you.

Arcades aren't about to become your new favourite band or a major rediscovery, and I don't know if they ever re-appeared in decade and more since this one.

Might have been interesting if they had persisted, they could have found their place.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.