Cover art can say so much about an album. On Pikelet's second full-length Stem, artist Celeste Potter (of Ouch My Face fame) depicts a collection of cute bunnies falling down a rabbit hole whose walls appear to be lined by a multi-coloured patchwork quilt. I know how those bunnies feel when I hear the arpeggiated synthesiser chords that ring out towards the end of ‘Toby Light’. There’s a sense that everything is moving away from me and I’m powerless to stop my descent into this technicolour, quilt-lined universe.

Stem is escapist music, conjured up from some fantastical universe beyond our own. There’s a patchwork element to it all because of the wide array of textures and sounds employed: guitars, clarinet, a vast arsenal of synthesiser tones and myriad percussive instruments. And the walls of this rabbit hole have to be lined by a quilt because the music is warm and inviting. I’m drawn in despite, or perhaps because of, Pikelet’s elliptical take on pop music.

It’s been almost three years since Pikelet (aka Evelyn Morris) released her eponymous debut, and this time around everything feels more rich and full. I’m not sure a song like ‘Weakest Link’ could have existed on any other Pikelet release. Like most of Stem, Morris’ vocals are doubled and doused in reverb, giving them a strange disassociated feel. It’s like she’s hovering above everything else, like some beautiful omnipresent spectre. When she hits the falsetto notes, synthesisers explode like fireworks.

For her second long player, Pikelet is still Morris’ baby, but Stem feels more indebted to the work of her band than previous releases. The Pikelet live band - Tarquin Manek (bass and clarinet), Shags Chamberlain (synths) and Matthew Cox (drums) – help Morris bring her colourful ideas to life. The music hints at her penchant for looping, but the loops themselves have been dismissed, or maybe they’re cleverly subsumed into the layers of instrumentation. Ideas are explored, repeated, built upon and explored again. There’s no such thing as verses or choruses in the world of Pikelet. They would just be boundaries, constraints on her creativity. Traditional notions of songwriting are discharged and in their place are wonderful textures, synthesised sounds and left-field lyricism.

The palette of Pikelet is so wide and expressive, and it’s the thing that makes listening to the entirety of Stem such a joy. Morris and her band effortless flit from the angelic delicacy of ‘Pillow Castles’ to the psychedelic space jam that is ‘Allergies’, which sounds halfway between The Flaming Lips and a sci-fi theme song. However, it’s futile trying to pin her down.

“I can’t explain,” sings Morris on the dramatic and grandiose ‘Face Point’, and it’s as though she’s singing about the music itself. “Just take my word for it.”

by Dom Alessio