Having got to be somewhere that I can play music over speakers rather than on headphones I’ve been been putting rather more effort into listening to new bands. High on the list has been Guillemots, one of the finalists for the Mercury Prize. Through the Windowpane has grown on me with listening. The album is a pleasant mix of driving pop rhythms on tracks such as “trains to brazil” and “annie, let’s not wait” with much more delicate tunes such as “redwings”, “little bear” and “if the world ends”. The mutli-cultural background of the band was one of the things that attracted me to them, and I’m pleased to see that it comes out well in things like the big horn sound on “trains to brazil”. Above all, however, Guillemots are not afraid to experiment. It doesn’t always work. The end of “annie, let’s not wait”, for example, dissolves an unfortunate chaos, but I’m happy to forgive them that and more for the magnificently audacious final track, “sao paulo”. This probably marks me out as the sort hopelessly pretentious git who can only have grown up during the era of pomp rock, but so it goes. I knows what I likes.