CIEL emerge from their proverbial cocoon with second EP, ‘Make It Better’.

Need a soundtrack for the summer? CIEL have you sorted.

*Photo: Lizzie Clark-Nørgaard | Words: Tash Saunders*

‘Make It Better’ is less a sitting duck waiting to be cherished; more the introspective bull that’s just broken into your china shop. Each song is a cry into the void, demanding to be heard… and boy have we heard. An eclectic mix of styles, the EP marks CIEL’s blossoming into something new.

The first track off the EP, ‘Something’, is classy, euphoric dream-pop. I’m at a festival! There are daisies everywhere! I am lying in the grass and my long hair spills out around me in a halo. I get up and dance like no one is watching. I’m dreaming in CIEL, and everything is pink. The sound is joyous, but the song’s strength comes from the vulnerability beating at its core. It’s a no-holds-barred, candid and upbeat expression of desire to connect. The riff is HUGE. It’s CIEL at their most confident: lilting, effervescent, irrepressible.

Ladies and gentlemen: we have a band with range on our hands. ‘So Scared’ is eastern-European darkwave meets electro-pop, Molchat Doma doing battle with La Roux. And again, that vulnerable, honest core stringing the EP together is ever present here. It demands our attention. There is a ring of beautifully simple melancholy, and certainly something to see live: this could be their stadium-filler.

If there was ever a mosh-worthy CIEL song, it would be ‘Make It Better’. It’s noughties Britney pop, but as grungey as it comes. The song is steeped in, hell, defined by, that same quiet desperation – the refrain: “nothing I do will make it better…” – that characterises the EP. It’s followed by runner-up for most mosh-worthy song, ‘Jealousy’. While weak on the verse, the chorus more than makes up for it: claustrophobic and angry, a little bit umami, a little bit alternate universe ABBA.

The ‘Make It Better’ EP feels like a step: a proud shedding-of-shell – an evolution. Vulnerability is nothing new in music, and CIEL haven’t yet made it to the moon; but their particular brand of dreampop-grunge sensitivity certainly feels like they’ve built the rocket.