While it may not be the most slight and effervescently scintillating folk release of the year , The Eastern Stars still offer up a deliriously pretty and lovable alternative to those fed up with sitting in camping chairs hoping that they won’t have to get up to poke the fire. And boy oh boy, it’s been a heck of a folky year so far, hasn’t it? Luckily, July 5th, 1961 cannot be lumped into that particularly derivative and referentially brazen melting pot. It remains enjoyably winsome and whimsical throughout, never overstepping its boundaries or outstaying its welcome.

The glorious lilt of They Know What To Do is testament to The Eastern Stars’ ability to capture the tune you’d follow in your head, as if they were already embedded within and just needed a gentle unearthing. Bouncing acoustic guitars and the gentle jangle of blippy keyboards are seldom joined by any other instrumentation, save for the rather bewitching vocals of Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong. It its their charming interplay that brings the personality, humanising the spaces constructed by the songs themselves in an illuminatingly personal way. Fuzzier experiments are not as successful, becoming a tad repetitive after some over-zealous exposition. Little Punk is a case in point, its casio intricacies somewhat tarred by daffy lyrics and uninteresting thematic conventions. The following Money Money We Want Yours contains the gem couplet ‘Money money, we want yours, by coercion and by force’, and backs it up with stop-start playfulness and bluesy resignation to poverty. A charmer.

So The Eastern Stars can wrap themselves around a cheeky melody and have a way with words. Big deal, so can everyone else. What separates them from those already endowed with more than a day’s songwriting experience is their wibbly charm, their sense of ramshackle experimentation without losing focus on the omnipotence of the woozy spirit behind it. Recorded in an alley shadowed by the Empire State Building, this has ‘written and recorded in one night cos we were bored’ written all over it, but the sheer warmth of delivery makes up for any slightly predictable troubadour tendencies. And even then, there aren’t many of those moments flying around. The Eastern Stars manage to conjure and sustain their own dream-like atmosphere without intruding on our own – a snapshot into a warped and comforting world of love and light.