Dial Tone Suite

Every texture here is expensive and every song ends before it commits to anything. Dial Tone Suite is a record that would rather be admired than heard. The production is immaculate — soft pads, carefully placed clicks, a vocal that arrives like perfume and leaves the same way. You can play it in a room and the room will improve. That is not the same as a song.

Pelham Grand knows how to make a surface. What is missing is a floor. Melodies suggest themselves and then retreat. Tracks that seem about to open stay closed. The EP format almost excuses this — six songs, no obligation to go anywhere — but the brevity starts to feel like evasion.

There is craft here. There is taste. There is almost nothing you will remember tomorrow. Gorgeous surfaces, no floor underneath. File under: music for leaving on.