Taking their name from a 1941 novel by Patrick Hamilton, the Bristol-based residents are married singer Victoria Bourne and guitarist Chris Harper. This is their second album following on from 2021’s ‘Painting With An Open Heart’. That was a multi-textured affair fusing folk and electronics with influences ranged from Gary Numan to Gillian Welch and This Mortal Coil, but this makes it seem almost simplistic, with Bjork and Ry Cooder cited this time around. Recorded at home with electronic and acoustic instruments, with embracing sobriety, the suicides of two friends and Bourne’s struggle with depression providing lyrical touchstones, it opens with ‘Softest Of Silks’, pulsing electronics and percussive clicks giving way to a steady marching rhythm and surging washes of guitar and keyboard before vocals arrive to create an ethereal, almost medieval liturgical feel as she sings about finding refuge and calm (“I saw from afar, a house made of stone/Made to survive, a gleaming white home/But now so near there’s no stone at all/But the softest of silks between you and the world”) as she asks “How many times did your head leave your heart behind?” before taking one more step up the stairs of recovery.
Finding support and healing through love is the core of ‘Hold My Hand’, a swirling but insistent and percussive melody behind those soaring prog-folk vocals on lyrics that address climbing out of the despair of depression (“And the dog is gone/In our love/In your love”) and she is able to “Let go my shadow/Let go my chain”. That emotional bond is there too on ‘When You’ (“Two lovers embrace/And the feeling it grows/When you love”), Bourne evoking thoughts of Les Mysteres de Voix Bulgares while the focused, almost tribal rhythm of the guitars and percussive and wailing electronics conjure a complementary Eastern European atmosphere.
Things are headier with an almost otherworldly opium blues delirium to the music with its ghostly guitar solo on the devotional ‘Thursday Redemption’ (“This word is a breath/A dash of life/I pass it to you/To be your wife/So it goes/So it passes/Every night is a dream/Sunset to sunrise/How lucky it seems/To reflect in your eyes/And so it goes/So it passes to you/I made this for you/To ease your yearning”) though whether the line “Our children will be heard and not seen” has a literal or metaphorical meaning is open to speculation.
There’s an itchy, pulsing electronica vibe to the title track with its resonator blues guitar as if Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie had been born in the Appalachians, the title a fairly clear clue as to the reset theme of the lyrics (“I close my eyes, and drift inside, I close my eyes/Feed the spark’s desire/A jolt beneath the mire/The charge you crave is near”). Arguably the most musically immediate number with its momentum building dappled and rippling guitar sounds and the exultant soaring vocals, ‘Gone’ is another on the theme of healing and coming back from the edge (“A ghost of a heart/It lives/Giving hope a fresh new start/I felt it break/It seemed/To take the pain, so much at stake/I clear ahead/It heals/I find the way, I live instead/You are all I need… Our joy is free, our hearts ablaze”).
Touching the six-minute mark with a mix of backwoods rootsy Americana to the guitar line and an orchestral sweep to the soothing melody and Bourne’s vocal wings, ‘Horizons’ with its rebirth imagery (“visualise a new sunrise, singing along/We’ll harmonise with the sky, where we belong/And the lost world will be here once more”) is utterly majestic as it gathers to the lengthy ebbing instrumental play-out. Harper providing a repeated strummed guitar riff, ‘Grandcamp Maisy’, named for a commune in the Normandy region of France, the track with its pulsing electronic wash and evoking a ship’s bell ringing in the distance, is a reverie of surrendering to the moment and holding on to the light (“I still remember the taste of sunshine on your lips/A coastal haze licks my skin/A magic love now lets me in/ (And we…became…the view)..I still remember floating to a dream of you/So many crashes/And so many burns/So many times, that I, would peek, through the flames/to see the dream, I had, of you”).
It ends with the simple stripped back chiming guitar and piano of ‘Endearment’ which, sharing its musical soul with Tim Buckley’s ‘Song To A Siren’, is an emotionally simmering supplication and hymn of gratitude for steadfastness in times of mental turmoil poignantly captured as he sings “Lightness you see/Darkness I find/A bridge, a hand/Our love defined/So scared to be/My busy mind/I feel your grace/I shall be kind…I must look up/To turn around/Shut out the noise…I hear your voice/I know you’re wise/You helped me now/I will arise …I melt he drinks me down with ease/I dance inside the seeds are sown”. An album of huge musical ambition matched to simple heartfelt themes, the circuitry is electrifying.
