Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for Nick Frater’s twelfth studio spectacular, Oh Contraire! – an album so ambitious it had to be recorded along Glastonbury’s ley lines just to contain its power!

Picture this: vintage synthesizers performing a circus act on sacred ground, while French horns (courtesy of Brian Wilson Band’s own Probyn Gregory) dance with strings from London’s Royal College of Music. It’s what happens when a sophisticated-pop architect decides to build a sonic skyscraper using Mellotrons for bricks and harmonies for mortar.

But wait until you hear about the handclaps – guerrilla-recorded in Abbey Road’s Studio 2 on a mobile phone, like musical ninjas executing the world’s most rhythmic heist.

This is an album where Supergrass meets Roxy Music for a motorik dance party, Queen crashes Supertramp’s prog picnic, and somewhere, somehow, a pelican gets involved.

From the French horn fanfare that kicks things off to the heart-wrenching goodbye that closes the curtain, Oh Contraire! is what happens when you let a master craftsman loose in a candy store of vintage gear and legendary spaces.

1. Fanfare [1:24]
2. My Heart’s In Stereo [2:22]
3. I Know You Know I Know [3:00]
4. Song For The One-Eyed City [2:56]
5. Final Reminder [2:29]
6. Seraphim Called [4:06]
7. One Minute [3:19]
8. Steal Away [3:33]
9. All Roads Lead To Home [3:46]
10. Dreaming Of A Wonderland [3:47]
11. Goodnight, Goodbye [2:37]

With stunning sleeve design by Adam Mallett, complete with a Where’s Nick? insert that turns personnel credits into a poptastic treasure hunt, the album opens on the simply beautifully sweeping, short, but sweet Fanfare and then we get the jangly pop sense of My Heart’s In Stereo, the rocker I Know You Know I Know and both the free flowing Song For The One-Eyed City and the poignantly sculptured indie-vibed Final Reminder.

Along next from this multi-instrumentalist and producer is the synth beauty Seraphim Called and the harmoniously soaring, veritably cinematic One Minute and they are in turn backed by the pleasing Steal Away, the piano ballad All Roads Lead To Home, the album rounding out on the lush Dreaming Of A Wonderland, coming to a close on the all-embracing Goodnight, Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, put on your rose-tinted glasses and tune your radios to the frequency of fabulous – it’s time to meet Nick Frater, Croydon’s answer to the question What if Burt Bacharach and The Beatles had a love child raised by vintage recording equipment?!

Official Purchase Link

www.nickfrater.com