Au Revoir Simone: Still Night, Still Light

Juxtaposition - between machines and humans, functionalism and emotion - is everything in electro-pop, and on their third album, this female three-piece strike a mostly perfect balance. Accused of being no more than photogenic cutouts, cooing listlessly about love from behind their vintage synths, the NY trio reward much deeper investigation. On Shadows, a wonderfully ambivalent lyric, "I'm moving on/I hope you're coming with me/'cos I'm not strong without you", zeroes in on the ability of the smitten heart to encompass both exasperation and realism; the distant, noises-off drums at the end of the dreamy, Postal Service-like Another Likely Story suggest the massing of doubt as much as they do the swell of romantic optimism; and Knight of Wands is simply one of the loveliest tunes to grace the genre in a good while.