How Are You Coping With This Century?

2021 debut album from Liverpool's Novelty Island is a highly enjoyable trip through sunny, quasi-psychedelic songcraft across tracks with titles like "Cowboy On A Bicycle" and "Blackcurrant Sky," songs with insistent alt-pop credentials such as Graham Coxon-indebted "Michael Afternoon" and the free flow of the one-day recordings such as album opener, "This Bird," the album is entirely 'other', yet cloaked in a warm-blanket of familiarity. Criss-crossed with cello, harmonium, horns and banjo, How Are You Coping With This Century? is an engine of parts that appear random, yet purrs with cultured reliability.