- The Maple Trail has been kicking along for a while now - this is their 3rd album, in fact - but you may be more familiar with the other thing its lead bloke, Aidan Roberts, does, being guitarist for Belles Will Ring. None of that intense indie-rocking here, thankyou: even those of you who are familiar with previous Maple Trail records will be in for something a bit different, Aidan sticks mostly to his acoustic guitar to make some quiet folk music. It immediately reminds me of Sun Kil Moon, although Aidan says he was at least partially inspired by Nick Drake's Bryter Layter - I think you can draw a line between those two and it leads to a fairly good sounding place. Both of those artists have a po-faced seriousness that characterises the brittle perfection of their music and, at its best, Cable Mount Warning partakes of it too. Actually, despite the move to mostly acoustic sounds, the songs themselves are less meandering and have more of a pop sensibility than previous Maple Trail fare. The singles especially - Highwire and The Dinosaur Hunters - bounce along, featuring some of the few electrified bits and on the former some mariachi horns for extra vim and vigour. There are quite a few instrumental additions lurking here and there: pedal steel guitar, piano, celeste, string sections and - Aidan is quite obssessed with Mike Oldfield - is that some tubular bell I hear on Barking Dog and Swallow? The variation may stem from the idea of the band when it was conceived, a modular group that could rotate members in and out at will and be the stronger for it - something that Aidan borrowed from Broken Social Scene. Call me perverse - you wouldn't be the first - but as good sounding as the new, boppier sound of The Maple Trail is, I enjoy them the most when they are really quiet and meandering. If that's something you like too, don't be alarmed, like I said this isn't indie-rock and there's a lot to be got from Cable Mount Warning. With luck, it should expand The Maple Trail's appeal more than ever before. I'm certainly going to be giving it a bit of a go up in our neck of the woods.

- Chris Cobcroft.