Monday, 20 February 2023
SUSS - SUSS, album review
Gentle Pedal
This is a collection of EPs, or simply a collection across time of this haunting ambient country, which I first heard and reviewed then here.
This continuance is graced yet again by the pedal steel, but also all the other instrumentation, like simple acoustic guitar on That Good Night which strums in and out of the echoing, a sound that one visualises across a scenic expanse of that sound. A banjo joins later.
There are many emotions prompted across this collection's 21 tracks, but above all it is the soothing that swells over my aural landscape. I should qualify that in referencing the plaintive too, and this is a reflection of loss as with a founding member who recently passed - and it includes the more ruminative intentions of the music as it arcs across our troubled times.
Read more and get it here.
Sunday, 5 February 2023
Friday, 3 February 2023
Meg Baird - Furling, album review
Beautiful Touch
There is ethereal music as on the wordless vocal of opener Ashes, Ashes where piano and drum beat out a background mantra. When there is folk singing as on Star Hill Song, it too is ethereal but in the gorgeous rather than ghostly sense, and these two beginnings set a prettiness for all to follow. Beautiful harmonies soothe with the unfurling of more sweetness on third Ship Captains, and fourth Cross Bay has sublime acoustic guitar reminding of an era long before that Meg Baird continues to honour with her musically nostalgic continuance – on this track especially, and through the vocal, an echo of early Joni Mitchell. The rest is more touching the touchstones.
