Home Economics

Prinzhorn Dance School are still recognisably the same spiky Brighton-based duo whose ultra-rigorous debut cut through the excess of 2008 like a scimitar through bacon fat. But with their trademark stripped-down intensity now winningly off-set by moments of unabashed tenderness, their third album Home Economics continues and even accelerates the move away from austerity and into human warmth begun by its acclaimed 2011 predecessor Clay Class. All the best six-track albums - The Fall’s Slates, Orange Juice’s Texas Fever - know exactly what they want to say and how they intend to say it. Home Economics shares that infectious sense of urgency. There’s not an inch of spare meat on it - from Reign’s snatched moment of optimism, through Battlefield’s restorative meeting of minds with an urban fox on a drunken walk home in the early hours, to Let Me Go’s concluding tribute to “a love that won’t rewind and will not be deleted”. Spindly yet sensuous, together and alone, exquisitely sad but somehow full of hope, Prinzhorn Dance School knit together disparate and even opposite fragments into an utterly satisfying whole.