Strangely, if you take Broken Dog’s magical second album of secret lullabies and slow, gently crackling post-rock off the hi-fi and put on anything by Low, slow-core’s almost ridiculously bashful American gold standard…in fact, Low sounds louder. And when you consider they rose to semi-obscurity with the frozen wastes of Duluth, Minnesota, to inspire their near-silence, while Broken dog’s Clive (plangent sounds) and Martine (regretful voice) sculpt their ice cathedrals out of north London’s clatter, the luminous 'Zero' is all the more - quietly, of course - astonishing.
But its dreamlike volume, or lack thereof, still isn’t as remarkable - unless you’re a sound engineer that is - as the intuitive delicacy with which Broken Dog paint such big blue pictures on such translucent canvas, apparently only just remembering each consolatory note the instant it issues forth.
From a drifting 'Iceberg' made of strings tuning up in empty rooms to the diaphanous guitars and shyly subliminal noise-scribbles of 'In A Head' to the fond wink of 'Still Here?' and a pulsingly abstract hidden track that cranks the volume up to, oh, at least three, this is haze and shimmer of the highest order. Add some unhesitatingly affecting melodies - a soaring, harmonium-and-acoustic 'New Year' or a piano-stitched, secretly amused 'laughing Girl' - and you’ll wonder why everyone else is shouting.
Shhhh. Listen.

Broken Dogs haunting melodic cocktails ooze out of their new album 'Zero' with as much smoothness as Piers Brosnan riding that bike in that James Bond movie. Oh yes this is as smooth as Massive Attack, with the intelligence of Bjork. Songs like Laughing Girl, are so melodically poignant and rise above the hard core crap of today’s society. Close your eyes and feel yourself float above the world until you are merely an observer and have no links with insanity. The album is tight and flows exceptionally well, sliding from one enchantment to another. Running out in the Wild, runs away with your imagination. You’ll listen to this so many times that you’ll meet yourself coming back. It rarely gets harder than cotton, but cotton’s more comfortable than wool, don’t ya think?

What a horrid listening experience this turned out to be. Maybe I should have been warned off by the first track "Iceberg" which was two minutes and three seconds of a cello sliding up and down the scale. But it got worse, with every song littered by an unharmonious clash of guitars and strings topped by a girlie singer with an annoying whispery voice. The last track is titled 'Still Here?' to which the answer must be: Sorry, gave up long ago.

Taking their name from an unpublished Verlaine libretto ('I’m an empty paper bag, a broken dog barking at a brown moon'), this is their second full LP for Big Cat records. A curious mixture of breathless vocals, eerie guitar and unearthly psychedelic noises, Zero is melancholy, lonesome and strangely hypnotic. You’ll find yourself singing words that you hadn’t even realised you’d heard. Fragile and beautiful. Superb.