Fans of the Bon Iver school of album mythology will like the style of indie veteran Jannis Noya Makrigiannis. After splitting with his old band, Lake Placid, he took off to a village on a Greek island, where he wrote the songs that would become his debut solo album. The finished product was recorded in a studio, which negates any pastoral elements, but there's still a sense of rugged isolationism here as Makrigiannis sings about claustrophobia and escapism. Sometimes it works brilliantly: opener Hollow Talk, built around a single repeated piano note, is hauntingly good. Overall, though, it's too smooth and metropolitan to inspire the same reaction that Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago did last summer.
