Amor - Sinking Into A Miracle

Debut album by Glaswegian open-ended dance band, featuring long-running experimental musician Richard Youngs on vocals and piano and Paul Thomson (Franz Ferdinand) Follows two critically acclaimed 12-inch singles. For fans of David Mancuso's Loft parties, Arthur Russell

Sinking Into A Miracle is the debut album by Glasgow’s AMOR, a quartet of musical travellers exploring the sonic open-ended-ness of dance music. Following two critically acclaimed 12-inches, this is a fully developed treatise on ecstasy and transcendence. Here, Richard Youngs, Michael Francis Duch, Paul Thomson and Luke Fowler are more honed, razor sharp in focus and timing, testing their instrumental prowess on condensed song structures and new, enlightened feelings of expansive hope and bliss. From the outset, it’s an ambitious yet ultimately inclusive journey.

Recorded to 24-track tape at Chem 19 and mixed by Paul Savage and Richard McMaster (Golden Teacher), this full length retains the elastic grooves of Paradise and Higher Moment, the group’s previous singles, but relinquishes the classic Philadelphia International-tinged sound in favour of looser rhythmic patterns. There are new depths to the compositions: a more free-flowing approach to percussion and deft experiments in hybridity make for a full and rounded, emotionally tinged record. Indeed, there are times when AMOR sound like the lost house band from David Mancuso’s Loft parties: Richard Youngs’ uplifting, gospel-tinged lyrics talk about moving beyond, universal truths, sailing through the horizon. It’s a wide-eyed optimism Mancuso would perhaps have approved of and which is embroidered with spectral details that begs to be auditioned on large, tweaked out sound-systems. Fantastic cover art by Robert Beatty.

Tracks

1. Phantoms Of The Sun

2. Glimpses Across Thunder

3. Full Fathom Future

4. Heaven Among The Days

5. Truth Of Life