Polygon Hotel: Cringle Park Green Vinyl LP

Pre-Order Item. Release Date Subject to Change.
Label: Memphis Industries
Release Date: 19th February

This record couldn't get closer to home for this shop as Dutch Uncles 7th album is an ode to Levenshulme, where this very shop (my house) is based. It's the place lyricist and vocalist Duncan Wallis has laid down his roots with the great people and places that make up this wee part of Manchester forming the inspiration of the album. Like their albums before their sound borders on experimental pop, art pop, sophistipop and never too far away from ripping into late era Talk Talk. 

After 18 years together, Dutch Uncles remain thrillingly
impossible to pigeonhole. Always more interested in following
the white rabbit than they are in playing by the rules, the
Stockport-formed sextet push their instinctive, exploratory
approach to new heights on latest LP Polygon Hotel and deliver
some of the most richly rewarding music of their career.
Inspired by the people, places and chance encounters of
Levenshulme, Manchester, where vocalist and lyricist Duncan
Wallis has finally laid down firm roots, Polygon Hotel takes its
name from a disused local pub, reimagined as a home for the
records disparate characters and stories: a place where its
laments, absurdities and breakthroughs could coexist. It’s a
fitting metaphor for an album that moves between the personal
and the surreal, the darkly comic and the quietly profound.
On Polygon Hotel, the band leaps headlong into the unknown;
reinvigorated, and rediscovering the strange, playful chemistry
that first united them. Self-produced and bringing together
formal experimentation, atypical time signatures and
labyrinthine melodies that burrow stealthily into your psyche,
Polygon Hotel is the sound of Dutch Uncles at their most
adventurous and unmistakably themselves.
Beneath its playful sonic exterior Polygon Hotel is, at its heart,
an album about control – what we inherit, what we lose, and
what we can still change – though Wallis only recognised the
theme after its completion. The first half circles the past and its
inescapable baggage, from lost time and death to old mistakes
and the people we once were, before a gradual shift in
perspective opens the door to something more hopeful.
It is their first album as a six-piece, with longtime touring multi-
instrumentalist Henry Broadhead and guitarist Neil Wright
joining Duncan Wallis, bassist Robin Richards, guitarist Peter
Broadhead and drummer Andrew Proudfoot as full-time
members of the band.