You should know who Guillemots are by now, so I'm gonna try to steer clear of the obvious. For the unenlightened, Good Weather For Airstrikes's Mega-Profile includes this week's track, lots of others, and some carefully arranged letters, numbers and punctuation, a fine example of which is “you can't go wrong with a Guillemots song”.
The Aristazabal Hawkes-sung (and written) By The Water – from their Of The Night EP, released via the web this Valentine's Day – is simply lovely.
Her voice sounds a lot like Régine Chassagne of The Arcade Fire, and Feist; incidentally, all three are Canadian.
By The Water is the kind of song that mesmerises right from the start. The fade-in intro builds to an attention-grabbing and assertive opening line; the confident vocals accentuated with some slightly-jazzy piano draw you in. It remains intoxicating throughout its gradual progression towards the slow, quiet coda.
It's the sort of song you snap out of afterwards. If you download one track this week, make it By The Water.