I'm still enjoying the preview.
Stick a lovely echoey guitar or two on Evergreen and it could easily have been a single released post-Metamatic and pre-The Garden era in the same way the Miles Away single was.
Having said that though, I don't think there's anything remotely 'retro' about Evergreen and it's more forward-looking rather than a nod back to any previous work.
A confident slice of 'pop' synth with no froth to it at all.
Its melodic pulse should make me think that it owes something to the beatlesque or kraftwerkian influence that Johns previously looked to in his work, but to his credit its not coming through. Its altogether a different flow to the Foxx/Louis electro, and although its not overly-textured it has a fuller sound to some of the more basic layout or harsh synth of earlier Foxx and Gordon works (although the remastered albums of that era eventually gave a richer impression).
I like this shift that's taken place, its not too subtle and its not too obvious either.
Having heard some of the Interplay tracks at the Roundhouse gig, one impression that I was left with back then was that the album was not going to feel consistent, the tracks seemed quite varied in style. I'm wondering now if they will have been tweaked slightly to travel a little more in the same direction, and if the 'key' that Evergreen resides in is a good indicator of what we might expect of the final sound in the forthcoming album.
