Album Review: Oh! Mighty Engine by Neil Halstead

Slowdive founder burns slowlyAfter the quiet triumph of his first solo outing, 2002’s Sleeping On Roads, Neil Halstead apparently decided there was no need to fix what wasn’t broken. Smart guy. Oh! Mighty Engine returns to the land of sublime bedroom pop, all acoustic-based and velvet-vocaled, sincere but never strained, pretty and bittersweet. (See, in particular, “Queen Bee” and the title track, which are beautiful but disheveled—like a really attractive person with bedhead.) As a founder of 1990s shoegazers Slowdive, Halstead was a master of room-filling, soul-searching, eyeliner-smeared sound.

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With his shoegazing days in Slowdive far behind him and things still quiet on the Mojave 3 front, Neil Halstead has nestled back into the folds of the twilight folk he first discovered with debut solo album Sleeping On Roads. Six years on, he's found a new home on fellow surf junkie Jack Johnson's label, but his butter-soft acoustic mumblings remain true to his whimsical British spirit. "From London to the Irish coast, this is the land I love, love the most," he sings on Queen Bee, his voice a windswept sigh.

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