Liverpool’s Outfit have been knocking around for most of this decade without making any great impression on the world. Perhaps it’s because their music sounds so unassertive and uninsistent at first: songs seem half-formed, with cool synths, piano, skeletal rhythms, a keening voice – and little more. It’s very much in the vein of what one music writer recently called “white pyjama music” – the unashamedly wimpy end of early 80s mainstream pop, in which groups such as the Lotus Eaters laid their hearts bare. The more you listen, however, the more compelling it becomes. There’s a self-flagellatory edge to the lyrics – “I try to do the right thing, always do the wrong thing” – that stops them from being merely mopey. And the those half-formed songs reveal themselves to be complete, but not burdened with unnecessary adornment. By the time the closer, Swam Out, heads into its grand, sweeping coda, you’ll be entranced.
