“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city,” said Dorothy Parker. Emily Mortimer called it “the beauty parlour at the end of the universe”. You don't need to tell Vancouver based multi-instrumentalist Nicholas Krgovich. His sleek future-pop has revelled in LA's twin beauty and darkness for years. That “unknowable sprawl,” that “twinkling land of dreamers and desperation and ambition and beautiful weather,” as he calls it, was the backdrop for last year's cult acclaimed solo album On Sunset. Now comes another set of twilight tales of darkened boulevards and sun-soaked mansion pool-sides, and the ghosts and eccentrics who inhabit them. The Hills is 12 tracks of analogue synths, intricate melodies, lush strings and slinking rhythms, as labyrinthine and intoxicating as the city that inspired it. Krgovich – best known for his work with No Kids, P:ano and the 1960s girl-group influenced Gigi, and for collaborations with the likes of Mount Eerie, Nite Jewel and Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman – began writing The Hills in a snow-covered hut in the Rocky Mountains in the winter of 2008, before taking to a relative's lake house to write more. “I would write every day all day and then make dinner and watch 30 Rock at night,” he explains. Influenced by “what I guess people call sophistipop – Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, The Blue Nile, Sade, music that makes me feel like I'm in the backseat of the car when I was a kid and it's raining”, Krgovich gradually found songs coming together th