Stray

Stray Fantasies marks a deepening of the discography of wife-and-husband duo Hollie and Keith Kenniff under their collaborative moniker Mint Julep, an expertly manicured electric-pop venture that stands in stark contrast to the nebulous and experimental Helios and Goldmund outputs for which the latter member is known (though both members have ambient projects under their own names). Where those projects seek to defy conventional songform through textural, amorphous exploration, Mint Julep gels all the elements with a surprising and impressive songwriting expertise that speaks to the skill and well-roundedness of its creators. Stray Fantasies further proves this by delivering twelve fully crystallized, iridescent pop pearls glimmering with the interplay of synthesizers, pulsing basslines, and punching drums that ballast Hollie’s oneiric singing as she unfurls themes of vulnerability, insecurity, and other aching minutiae of love and relationships.

1976's Houdini found Stray in recovery mode from the record company and personnel change woes that had afflicted the previous year's uneven Stand Up and Be Counted album - one of the few occasions in their career when the enduring London outfit could be accused of playing it relatively safe, in what seemed like a conscious attempt to chart a single at radio. Not that they were about to risk the same level of almost reckless creative adventure that had both thrilled and confused the punters who'd purchased their first four albums, but anthemic Houdini tracks like the title song, "Fire and Glass," and "Give a Little Bit" nevertheless showed a confident resumption of the gritty guitar work that had underpinned most of Stray's best efforts past…

After two albums of inventive, unpredictable progressive hard rock, Stray kept chugging right along with their third album, Saturday Morning Pictures, which notably found guitarist and guiding force Del Bromham growing ever more obsessed with the latest synthesizer technology, although not to the point where gadgetry was crowding out his ever-dominant fretwork, or completely hijacking the band's analog roots. Rather, Bromham's ever-growing arsenal of synths and keyboards mostly added enriching nuances to some of the band's more adventurous material like "After the Storm," "Sister Mary," and "Move That Wigwam," featuring an odd mixture of country-fried harmonicas and Native American themes…

London's Stray followed up an eclectic eponymous debut with more of the same on their 1971 sophomore effort, "Suicide", which of course was just dandy since "more of the same" on this occasion essentially entailed another imaginative melding of different musical genres under the broad, forgiving definition afforded by the progressive rock tag. As to the album's rather negative title, it didn't foreshadow a radical shift toward the quartet's pre-existing heavy rock tendencies (actually, more keyboards were the hot novelty here) so much as a reflection of these songs' darker overall mood when it came to their lyrics…