Pearse McGloughlin & Justin Grounds: Idiot Songs

Sligo singer-songwriter Pearse McGloughlin and Cork-based English songwriter/musician Justin Grounds have teamed up to create an album inspired, in part, by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. If that all sounds a tad too esoteric for you, then prepare to be shamed, surprised and beguiled by a short suite of forlorn tunes that exemplify elegance, subtlety and good taste. If there’s a starkness and solitariness to proceedings, then blame the winter of 2013, as the pair – McGloughlin in Ireland, Grounds in Canada – delivered and worked through mixes online. It matters little if you’re unfamiliar with the source; what’s important is what the two have created, which is a series of sonic gems (gifted with beats and beautifully spectral spoken-word inserts) that breathe life and art into electronic music. idiotsongs. bandcamp.com Download: The Courage of Truth, Villages of Ether, Dominion