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Lonelyspeck: Lave

Article originally appeared on The Music Mar 6th 2017

Lonelyspeck’s second EP is like being adrift on a glass sea. It’s rife with slightly distorted, crystalline beauty; peaceful and enchanting, but also distinctly sharp, with an air of purposeful refraction. Sione Teumohenga lets their voice wash across the five-track offering with amazing lightness, dipping in and out of their instrumentation and skittish ambient trappings with casual ease. It often feels as though their singing is simply another sample, a synthetic string to be plucked and composed alongside the rest of their tools. Lave is an unexpectedly lively thing, ponderous yet full of hidden depths and immediate appeal.

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Nadia Reid: Preservation

Article originally appeared in The Music Feb 23rd 2017

Loquacious but laconic, almost despondently idyllic, Preservation is a deeply personal emergence story framed as though Gus Van Sant were directing a butterfly biopic, so that every triumph still feels a bit muddy and conflicted. Reid’s latest comes with a much fuller sound than her first, somehow rounded and confident while still maintaining the supple, yearning vocality and folkish modernity of her storytelling. Effectively an album about the exploration of self, its climaxes are more intimate and more subtle, the sounds of minor successes put to string. Preservation is mellow, mature and quietly at peace with the world.

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Duke Garwood: Garden Of Ashes

Article originally appeared on The Music Jan 27th 2017

If you hold Duke Garwood up to the light, all you might see is the silhouette of some gothic country contemporaries. It’s easy to pick out those influences, but much harder to dig up the true meaning in his work. Whether celebratory or inflammatory, there’s a not-quite-resigned passivity there, almost nonchalance, and it can make you wish he were more chaotic and melancholic. Although full of sumptuous imagery and crafty instrumentation, Garden Of Ashes is slightly too delicate, too ‘take me as you will’, and Garwood’s crushed sandstone intonations often leave much of the emotion just out of reach.

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Man & The Echo: Man & The Echo

Article originally appeared on The Music Nov 11th 2016

Man & The Echo’s debut has a certain ‘dinner and a show’ vibrancy to it, the swinging rhythms of buffet cabaret and the storied threads of a Dusty Springfield type somewhere on the road to Vegas punditry.

It’s a skittishly retro sound that eats off a dozen plates, blue-eyed soul buried under bites of disco, country-seasoned crooning and a suitable Britpop base, with songs that take their truths as much from cultural mythology and literary illusion as they do from elderly care and suburban despair. Many of these tales are extrapolated from frontman Gareth ‘Gaz’ Roberts’ own experiences, the years spent working for welfare rights or the dead-eyed pub patrons staring back at him at night. At times it can brush awfully close to self parody, but there’s an unalloyed sincerity in Roberts’ delivery that buoys the benefit of the doubt, enough to warrant following through on the homespun narrative threads that tie the inspirations to their tracks, and though the rhythms and themes have their own ebb and flow, the energy of the album never wavers.

The UK four-piece present even the most absurd portions of their material with a wholly committed zeal that unifies the album and speaks to their easy cohesion as a group. Even if the mix of elements may seem disparate at first, the end result is something familiar yet wholly idiosyncratic. It’s not new or daring necessarily, but is nevertheless completely fresh. As a first course, Man & The Echo is boldly genuine and compellingly flavoursome.

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