Sinner DC’s first album for Ai Records starts off in fine style with the ambient-electronic track Everything Is Sand. The sound elements utilised here pretty much encapsulate this Swiss band’s dogma, welding together distorted but sumptuous melodies with simple loops and layers of slide guitar. Manuel Bravo’s vocoded vocal gives the track a dreamy feel, the overall sound not oceans away from the likes of shoegazer’s My Bloody Valentine or Slowdive.

Following a lull on the disinteresting On & On, the album returns to form with No Day Without You, where, again, heavily layered – and what sounds like reversed – synth lines stray over more wistful vocals and heavily dampened guitar distortions. Meanwhile, They Never Stay is perhaps the clearest indication of the band’s admiration for Boards Of Canada – although the overall production on this track and most of the album lends it a fuzzy sheen that’s also quite reminiscent of Fennesz.

Lady-March then strolls along with a shadowy wanderlust; the more you play this album the more these tracks desire to jump on your neck and drill into your subconcious. On The Ocean again reeks of BOC meets Slowdive, as dense beats make way for a roaming, sequenced synth melody and more haunting vocals from Bravo.

Although Sinner DC’s influences are fairly palpable, there’s enough quality here to admire the work and call it distinctive. However, there are also enough lapses to infer that they’re by no means the finished article, the drum programming for one is a little lifeless throughout, whilst too many tracks, no matter how initially attracting, tend to end exactly how they started – with little deviation in between.

Ultimately, I remain impressed; Mount Age is a tidy little album with some decent offerings, and with sustained progress the foundations are well set for a bright future for Sinner DC.