Playing with other artists over the years, Emmett Kelly has exhibited an encompassing approach to music which lends flexibility to The Cairo Gang’s song-style. He’s a harmony singer of supreme skill, bringing not only a sweet and supple voice but also a tremendous sympathy to the singing of it (as anyone who’s caught Cairo onstage with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy will ever know). Now a couple of albums and tapes and singles and things into it he’s making streamlined music for the ears, constructing with a heavy hand in order to have a heavy impact with more than just sounds but songs and beaming them in on bright bolts of sunshine.

‘Gone Missing’ isn’t just an awesome, awesome-sounding record of guitar pop that rocks, of songs sweetly hung with candified hooks; also it’s a new report from the side of the road. The Cairo Gang have made tracks and travelled distances from their former states of mind, their former hooded selves.

The Cairo Gang have found themselves – their most perfect alignment to date, taking a more intuitive path to the song, letting go of the sense of design, letting it write itself, as it will in the right hands.

‘Gone Missing’ was written in between places, on the run, recorded in a variety of rooms. Lines appear to have been straightened – yet still, blood beats sidewise inside Cairo’s temples, their rebel heart is drunk on the outskirts of town. The impulse to dig underneath the bittersweet heart, to invert meaning, shapes the songs of ‘Goes Missing’.