The day a shoe-gazing indie band who write ethereal songs about love and ennui (delivered with spooky emotional detachment) set these to anything other than shimmering, filigreed guitar and wheezing keyboards will be the day we know the revolution is nigh. But who needs something as untidy and inconvenient as revolution when you can have Clive Painter and Martine Roberts, back with a fifth helping of coffin-table music that is as beautiful and sepulchral as much determinedly insular music can be? So delicate it seems to leave only a trace of chill breath on your neck, '' Harmonia '' is almost certainly embedding itself slowly but surely in your unconscious. '' Don't sing to me, don't let that sweetness near. '' intones Roberts, doing precisely what she cautions against. Wonderful.

Dreamy lo-fi duo deliver diaphanous career-best
One suspects, frankly, that fans of the diffident lower-case furrow ploughed by introspective boy-girl combos ever since Fraser and Guthrie first sculpted with powdered sugar and Hope Sandoval whipped her minions to attention will happily buy this noise by the filmy yard. Londoners Clive Painter (honeyed guitars) and Martine Roberts (breathily sotto voice) have always met audience expectations, but their fifth outing as Broken Dog sees them surpass their dreamy brief with shy aplomb, undercutting lassitude with uneasiness ('' I'll Think Of It Today ''), icy starlight with scratchy dissonance ('' Alone With A Pounding Heart'') and, in the full-blooded swell of '' Waiting For Something Big '', a glorious glimpse of May sunshine through those wistful, wintry skies.

Those drawn by lovely, lonely, trance-inducing melancholy will be thrilled at the return of Broken Dog following a two year hiatus. In the interim Clive Painter and Martine Roberts have been busying themselves raising the likes of (The Real) Tuesday Weld, Sigmatropic and Monograph to higher planes, returning with an all-too-short (38 minute) set of twitchy noir, otherwordly ethereality and rumbling threnody. Roberts' perpetually erotic baby-doll voice takes centre stage, but the real stars are Painter's vivid, multi-instrumental constructions; intricately folded, almost symphonic pieces that aren't so much arranged as forced into strangely-shaped boxes - one minute evoking a colliery band, the next decamping to Twin Peaks. Remarkably - for this is their fifth album - they're still revealing untapped potential. Wow.

Broken Dog are at the intersection of avant-abient and neo-folk music, drifting slow-mo acoustic across hushed electronica and the celestial effect that sounds like the dreams of sleeping children. Lifting them above the sludge of similar bands is outstanding vocalist Martine Roberts, who recalls Hope Sandoval and Stina Nordenstam but also survives with her own persona intact. Harmonia is the London band's fifth album and, alongside more mainstream bandssuch as Zero 7, sounds almostperversely uncommercial. Lovely, if only for those late nights when you can't listen to anything else.

If Broken Dog's Clive Painter and Martine Roberts were from a hip backwater in the States they would be much bigger, after five albums, than they are now. Their collective vision is one that walks the same meloncholy dirt roads populated by the likes of Low and Mazzy Star. Multi-instrumentalist Clive paints the musical backdrop with brushed guitars and swathes of psychedelic Harmonium effects while Martine's haunting, breathy vocals add colour to the picture. Broken Dog create a wall of sound in much the same way that Phil Spector or Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine do. Yet, theirs is a more gentle, folkier approach. The emotional impact is just the same though, with tunes like the beauteous, brass-tinged 'I Do Not Trouble', or 'Alone With A Pounding Heart' which brings to mind the atmospheric, cinematic vision of early Goldtrapp. The country-tinged 'Waiting For Something Big' and the sublime 'Radios' have a stark and mysterious beauty. The darkly gothic 'I'll Think Of It Today' is harmonia's finest moment in a collection of nine near-perfect tracks.

You may have a record a little like this already. Most likely, it's a record by Mazzy Star, to whose gauzey atmospherics Clive Painter and Martine Roberts owe a substantial debt. Roberts is no Hope Sandoval, either vocally or lyrically (Origin is Unknown the worst offender on both counts), but for the most part, that's just fine; her slightly frayed voice suits the crackle of I'll Think of it Today and, especially, the slow burn of Words to a tee.