The Arch Conjuror of England

Suffolk-based rustic psych-rockers The Future Kings Of England offer on their fourth album the soundtrack for a creepy ghost story written in 1904 by MR James, in which a sceptical professor has his certainties rattled when he finds a Bronze Age whistle and with it summons up… who knows what? A ghost? Evil spirit? Teasingly, the written extracts never fully explain, which is all to the good. Save for a few brief lines in two tracks, it's entirely instrumental, the band skilfully blending the bucolic with the eerily industrial into a vivid series of doomscapes. They stray at times into boggy progginess, but at their best ("The Globe Inn", "Convinced Disbeliever") they have the steady, unhurried manner of Pink Floyd en route to some grand epiphany.