..listening to Lost Friends And New Found Habits is like stepping through the looking glass into a world that’s ever so familiar and yet completely different from our own.
Doctors & Dealers – Lost Friends and New Found Habits
http://www.myspace.com/doctorsanddealersband
Doctors & Dealers is the work of Swedish chanteuse Sparrow (and a few friends) and buyer, please beware, because she may well steal your heart and you won’t even realise that she’s doing it. Lost Friends and New Found Habits is a deceptively simple record. At first it seems childish, retro and almost amateurish but then, somewhere around Sunday Morning (track 7) you’ll begin to realise just how wonderful a little album this is. It sounds like it was created, not so much in a bygone era but a kind of parallel universe. If Sparrow’s real name isn’t Alice then it should be because listening to Lost Friends And New Found Habits is like stepping through the looking glass into a world that’s ever so familiar and yet completely different from our own.
Guitar, bass, drums, piano. The instruments are normal enough (although there’s a glockenspiel hanging around quite often too) but they sound as if they’ve been recorded in a distant tunnel and you’re wandering through the darkness trying to find them. The effect is spellbinding, like you’ve stumbled into some kind of Fairy Tale world where all the colours are more vibrant and everything seems so charming and exciting. It’s an intoxicating listen. Wonderfully kooky and blissfully bizarre, Lost Friends and New Habits is as much of a treat as finding a gingerbread house in the woods. Wherever it is that you always used to go in your mind as a child, this album will help you find the way back there and for that reason alone it should be cherished. Do the child that lives inside you a favour and step through the looking glass, take a walk through the wardrobe or follow that white rabbit once again.
Words: Damian Leslie