The Wedding Present may seem an unlikely influence for softly-softly electropop duo Oh Wonder. But Josephine Vander Gucht and Anthony West have followed the indie band’s example, releasing a song per month for a year – though, true to the times, they opted for Soundcloud uploads rather than the Wedding Present’s seven-inch singles in 1992. The results make up this debut, which may sound familiar not only because you could have already heard 13 of its 15 songs online but also because Oh Wonder’s breathy synthpop starts to collapse into mind-numbing, mid-tempo fluff about halfway through. Gucht and West make little use of their voices, choosing to harmonise in octaves that add to the album’s monotony, and on Landslide recall a boy-girl Postal Service. Lose It, with its Banks-like jazzy chords, is a rare saving grace, while Dazzle shows some production flair. Kudos to the duo for attempting a novel release model, one with more ingenuity than the music itself.
