Maritime: Glass Floor

If you rank amongst those people that didn’t take to The Promise Ring’s hotly debated finale ‘Wood/Water’, Maritime – the new project from former TPR’ers Davey vonBohlen and Dan Didier, plus The Dismemberment Plan’s Eric Axelson – are unlikely to float your proverbial boat.

Musically ‘Glass Floor’ picks up where that underappreciated gem finishes, ditching the suffocating melancholia and serving with a healthy dose of sunshine and Vit C. So this time there are more nods to The Smiths’ brighter moments (‘If All My Days Go By’) and even dabs of ‘60s surf pop fighting it out in vonBohlen’s vivid soundscapes. It’s also far less emo. And with a genre so knackered that tatooed tosser Dashboard Confessional is considered an icon, that must be for the best.

Dreamy melodies cascade over one another in ‘Souvenirs’ and the mighty ‘Some One Has To Die’, while the freewheeling ‘James’ could teach Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Michael’ a thing or two in the art of hedonism. As with ’Wood/Water’ it’s not all quite hanging off the rafters in the quality stakes, but nothing dips much below the high standard set by the first few songs and this time no one song outlasts its welcome by exceeding the five minute mark. An unexpected treat.