Popstrangers are poised and ready to take the world by storm. The trio's second album for Carpark Records is one that takes all the good will and good music they engendered on Antipodes and pushes it further into the stratosphere.
The group departed our shores, but they have successfully retained their homegrown sound, and even managed to build upon it. Popstrangers' stock-in-trade are fun little pop numbers (the sort that had been favourites on their old record label, Flying Nun), which have been mutated beyond recognition and then buried under a veritable mountain of haze. You don't have to look any further that opening track 'Sandstorm' to get a feel for this. Right from the get-go this is a heady, headphone friendly record that strikes a careful balance between psychedelic bliss and narcotic gloom at every turn.
Fortuna is a confident step forward for our ever-impressive native talent. They have proved now for the second consecutive album that they can hang with fickle foreign tastes, and long may it continue. This is not the last we have heard from Popstrangers.
