Image credit: Rosie Sco

After relentless touring built up an impressive following for the Edinburgh folk band before they even released their first single, Bound For The Sky confirms Curiosity Shop as one of Scotland’s most exciting new songwriting talents.

The most curious thing about Curiosity Shop’s Bound For The Sky is that it’s only the Edinburgh five-piece’s debut release. Such is the buzz around the band’s first performances and social media virality, it feels like Curiosity Shop have been plying their trade in careworn, fraternal alt folk for years already. Besides supporting fellow folksy frontrunners Divorce last year, the band have played at a smattering of the UK’s finest indie festivals: Deershed, Mosely Folk, Great Escape, and High Voltage just to name a few. They’d played four sold out headline shows across Scotland and signed to Fontana Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music, before they’d even released their first single. If the career trajectories of similar rapid upstarts The Last Dinner Party or Curiosity Shop labelmates Knats are anything to go by, this band’s stock is set to rise and rise. Mercury Prize nods beckon.

For now, though, we’ll have to make do with this deeply lovely EP, a soothing set of five big-hearted folk tunes shrewdly timed to coincide with the arrival of autumn on these isles. An a capella rendition of opening track Crows was what first stopped the Fontana president in his tracks when he heard it at Great Escape Festival (“The venue dissolved and we were all transported to somewhere beautiful,” he told Music Week), and on the record it retains that intimate, delicate quality, Ruairidh Wallace’s harmonised vocals sighing over sombre accordion and guitar chords that swirl together like fallen leaves caught in an eddy. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy in the song’s depiction of an outcast, scavenging crow, but the lilting guitars and lush group harmonies add warmth, the wild world outside no match for the fireside crackle inside.

Bound For The Sky showcases Curiosity Shop’s newly minted mixture of earthy Scottish folk with a knack for a solid pop hooks. It’s easy to imagine the band referring to themselves as the “small town boy” with “big city dreams” on jazz inflected Wandering Arrow, pitter-patter drums and croaky accordion providing a frisson of old school Parisian sophistication. Books On The Wild, like most tracks here, feels far more Scottish than Parisian, complete with “roads becoming rivers”, a situation which anyone who’s spent any period of time in the country will surely recognise.

The EP’s most exquisite guitar playing comes with About a House, the intricate fingerpicking every bit Adrienne Lenker or Haley Heynderickx’s equal. The songwriting is more understated and perhaps less ambitious than Bound For The Sky’s other tracks, Curiosity Shop instead choosing to evoke a simple scene of falling asleep with a loved one in a dingy city centre flat, a mood which they absolutely nail. The EP’s highlight, though, is Rambling, which is cosy the same way a jovial wintertime ceilidh is cosy, erupting into a heady, euphoric finale. The band sing of heather-filled hills and highland splendour as an accordion bubbles into life, and even if the lyrics feel somewhat like a Visit Scotland ad, it’s hard not to get swept up in the earnest joy of it all. Larger, more ambitious projects surely await for Curiosity Shop. Make no mistake, these small town boys are well on their way to their big city dreams.

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