aaamusic | On 22, Apr 2013

I would totally understand if the term Math-Pop makes you flee in abject terror, dear reader. God knows I have every time I’ve come across it prior to the latest single from Norwich based quartet Olympians. Surely they’re functionally incompatible concepts? What have the fluid, intangible joys of pop music got to do with the rigid functionality of numbers? I was unconvinced to say the very least. And then I played the song. And my knee-jerk biases continue to be thrown in my face at an alarming rate. It’s almost like it’s a bad idea to judge things before you experience them. Filling My Heart With Weird Dreams is an absolute delight from start to finish, with swooning pop melodies propped up with off kilter instrumentation and some of the sweetest harmonies this side of Fleet Foxes. It floats soothingly for its three minutes and forty-one second running time, it’s outright catchiness only becoming apparent once you realize you’ve had the background woah-oh’s stuck in your head the whole day. In total, if this is still strictly speaking Math-pop, then Olympians have gone one step further than most by having an enormous, beating heart at the core of this stonking single. Highly recommended.

★★★★★

Will Howard