Metronomy is Joseph Mount, and in live form, it also includes Gabriel Stebbing and Oscar Cash as support musicians. According to Mount, who has long been a very in-demand remixer, Nights Out, his second album, had its genesis as “a half-arsed concept album about going out and having a crap time”. It’s not entirely clear how much of that concept remains in this finished product - especially given that only half of the tracks have vocals to tell us what they’re about - but perhaps that reference to concept albums is a signal of the intelligent, varied and consistently interesting set of tracks that Nights Out consists of.

The album is sequenced as though it has a concept behind it - “Nights Intro” and “Nights Outro” bookend everything else, and “Back On The Motorway” is titled like a reprise of “On The Motorway”. Curiously, these pairs of tracks actually have very little in common, but despite that the sequencing and titling decisions clearly weren’t accidental. The 7^th of the twelve tracks is even called “Side 2″, and is draped in vinyl-esque crackling and hiss. Continue Reading