Herons! are a band. Herons are a bird, yes, but add that exclamation mark and you find yourselves faced with one of those wonderful little discoveries you only get when you run a sporadic and ever-faltering music blog.

First things first: I’m not a twitcher. Second things second: by that, I mean to say that despite the title of this blog I’m not particularly into birdwatching. Third things third: I also don’t have any notable twitches, apart from when people argue for the continued existence of Nickelback.

Herons! are a band. Herons are a bird, yes, but add that exclamation mark and you find yourselves faced with one of those wonderful little discoveries you only get when you run a sporadic and ever-faltering music blog. In fact, it’s not entirely fair to say that I discovered Herons! for myself. They discovered me. Ben Kritikos, the band’s songwriter-in-chief, contacted me and essentially said “Hey! Listen to our music!”

Well, Ben, I’ve listened. And you know what? I ruddy love Herons! In the spirit of WWL, let me count the ways:

1. You’ve got the aesthetic all right. I open my little parcel and inside is a little note written personally to me on just about the nicestpaper. Seriously, world, you need to see this paper. It’s just terrific. All sturdy and off-white and textured and posh. You could build a house with this shit, it’s so thick. And the album artwork! Have you ever seen an album cover as lovely as this?

Well, probably you have. But there’s a lot of album covers out there, and you know, this is still a pretty damned snazzy one. It has an air of nostalgia about it, but also harks back to other great albums of the past fifteen or twenty years. Not least this one:

But we’ll get to that later.

2. Herons! really shouldn’t be this good. You self-recorded this shit? Where? In the effing recording studio of Aasgaard itself? You have it all, guys. Like, everything. Your harmonies are down like a Black Hawk, your instrumentation is subtle without ever being forgettable. You know how to build a track – the way you build up ‘Chamber Music’. Man. It’s like watching the barn-building scene in Witness, only without Harrison Ford and Karl from Die Hard sharing secretly erotic glances.

3. I don’t want to make out that the album is anything less than it is… any less unique an effort, any less worthy of standing on its own two feet, but you know what? So Long! by Herons! is the closest England has yet got to Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. It’s big and brash and experimental one moment, but reclusive and contemplative the next. It’s also muchless interested on the ins and outs of feedback.

4. “We are sinking in the morning, so we don’t get too high/We digging deeper trenches, so we can touch the sky”. Lyrically, So Long! is ace. Just ace. Angry, biting satire and breathless cynicism. And then, gentle and affecting. “What can I do/What can I be/What can I say/To reach you, to reach you?” Ben’s lyrics are quick-witted but unpretentiously functional. He might not match the poetry of, say, Guy Garvey (our greatest lyricist), but he’s more than a match for The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. That’s a good thing. A very good thing.

5. We ruddy love Herons!, but man, you guys ruddy love exclamation marks, don’t you?

So Long! by Herons! is out now, released independently by the band. I don’t know if it’s available on vinyl but it really bloody should be.