He sure is a craftsman that Nick Craft, formerly of Sidewinder, currently of Zillions, a card-carrying Oxford student of history. In less adept hands, Play! Zeuxis: Xight? Zeen… - the ludicrously titled first album under his Zillions moniker – could very well be an indecipherable mess. Guitars are layered to the hilt, the pitch shifter hasn’t been worked so hard since Loveless by MBV, tape loops and atmospherics abound and the tremolo arm gets more of a workout than George Michael’s wrists.

But somehow, amid all this dense complexity, there’s a heart, a beat, a soul. When Craft pines for his blue-eyed girl over backwards guitars on ‘Back in Your Arms’ – “I’m going to see your face, see your face/ Behind every window and every door” – you feel his pain. Later, when he existentially asks, “Who is me?”, while 10,000 guitars blast away, you too reach for Sartre.

Like his hero Kevin Shields, Craft has that rare ability to make the off-kilter sound affecting. And while it’s hard to listen to Play! Zeuxis: Xight? Zeen… without thinking of its creative blueprint Loveless, an album that took Shields two years and 19 studios to create, there are other influences at play here too: the fractured folk of ‘The Sound of Falling Rain’, the Byrdsian solo that comes out of nowhere on ‘Leaves’. There are even shades of Craft’s old band Sidewinder on guitar freak-outs ‘Teeth of the Hydra’ and ‘Your Eyes’.

Moving. Masterful. Memorable. Do you really need a zillion reasons to get Play! Zeuxis: Xight? Zeen…?

by Darren Levin