The difficulty of sustaining long-distance relationships isn't a hardship exclusive to touring musicians. But the workers in song know all about divided loyalties, about following one's muse to play to half-empty hockey stadiums in North America (as Metronomy did with Coldplay in 2012) while leaving an inspiration of flesh and bone behind; about affection foundering on the time zone differential. Love Letters is one of those records – born, paradoxically, of a musician's wildest dreams – one that takes the enforced distances of musical success and uses them as a backdrop for all sorts of misadventures of the heart.
"Tube of toothpaste/ Facial cleanser/ Bar of soap and moisturiser," runs the contents of one soap bag, but this is no road record, full of grousing hotel blues – it's about longing, and ill communications. Call Me, implores one song, weighing up a relationship with analogue burbles. The whole album opens with an urgent plea: "I've gotta beam my message to ya/Straight from the satellite/Cos, girl, we're meant to be together/And back out there on the Riviera/It gets so cold at night".
Nobody writes actual love letters any more, Joseph Mount realises; it's just another retro fetish for the Devon auteur to romanticise. Metronomy's last album, 2011's Mercury-nominated The English Riviera, brought together the widescreen glamour of slick international pop with the bittersweet Heath-Robinson charms of the first wave of British synth-pop, circa 1981 – Buggles or Depeche Mode. Love Letters still has a thing for boxy little drum machines, kiddy keyboards and plangent one-finger solos. But now Mount has combined these with a fresh fixation: the 60s. Love Letters's terrific title track is pure Motown – it comes crashing in euphorically on the chorus, after a jazzy little prelude; it feels as though it has been around for ever. But this is a Motown tune in which baroque synth sounds and a continental trumpet solo can coexist. The song's Michel Gondry video – his first since Björk's Crystalline (2011) – continues the rinky-dink theme.
The album's greatest hit, however, is I'm Aquarius, a slinky masterpiece that owes its "shoop-doop-doop-ah" backing vocals to eras long past. Mount's genius phrasing, by contrast, owes everything to R&B and hip-hop. He's boggling at a break-up ("I'm aware of the procedure/ But normally it's me that leaves her," he offers). It's the fault of the stars, argues the breaker-upper. The reality is probably more earthbound.
These two terrific songs – plus the nagging Reservoir – make good on the promise of The English Riviera: that Mount and his auxiliaries have the skills to turn out great idiosyncratic pop. The bulk of Love Letters, though, backs off from the glittering mainstream superhighway on to a road less travelled. Recorded at the all-analogue Toe Rag Studios (where the White Stripes made Elephant), Love Letters is full of little audio curios. Boy Racers, for one, is a handbrake turn perhaps best understood as a tribute to Daft Punk; Mount now lives in Paris, and a feel for the French electronic scene (Air, too) runs through his work.
The 60s that Mount is really smitten with is the era of psychedelia. Month of Sundays is a love letter to the band Love, while Monstrous is a mystifying cod-medieval romp powered by a drum machine so primitive it might as well be from 1381. Mount worries about a girl vomiting ("Hold your hair back if you feel unwell," he advises); elsewhere, on The Most Immaculate Haircut, Mount's legs are giving way, there are pains shooting down his left side. It all adds to this album's persuasively woozy feeling of lovesickness.
