This third album of exquisite folk by the English singer-songwriter is a beautiful love letter to Ireland as a spiritual home as well as her Irish partner, flowing with delicious images, tenderness and intelligence. Following the brilliant second LP InFlux, which was more coloured by the difficulties of love and an embrace of solitude, this album is filled with unconditional love, happiness and intimacy. Savage is one of the best singers around to capture such qualities in melody with that sensitive delivery of rich, warm voice, and unflinchingly honesty. Perfectly balanced with acoustic instruments including piano and woodwind, and moments of sparser stillness, it’s a musical and lyrical embrace of the land and a person and a sense of oneness and belonging, the album and title track inspired by a plate discovered in an old London sewer, mysteriously inscribed with that message and dated 1661, and now part of the Museum of London collection. That timeless unearthing is echoed in Agnes, featuring also the voice of Anna Mieke, a song inspired by meditation and Irish folklore, and describes how “I’m under the soil curled into a soft moss bed”.
There’s a cosiness throughout and connection with the elements across many outstanding tracks. Opener Talk To Me unfolds that physical connection – “when I cry I taste like the sea”. The particularly gorgeous other previous Song of the Day, Lighthouse, is a wonderful extended metaphorical love song bringing together selfless solitude and guiding companionship, and has much of the warm sound arrangement of Nick Drake and even some of gentler period of Van Morrison. Very much in that mould, Donegal is a direct love declaration of how the place embraced Anna, written like a mythical story. “The day I arrived I dove into the sea and pleaded Donegal please look after me … I broke the the cold water shot me and … said I’ll look after you too.” And despite after leaving home, her mother warning not to fall in love, she of course does, with “the moss and views and her lovely man too”, joining a “British well-trodden queue” of others who have done the same, the music, in a lovely waltz time, swelling with passion and joy. Among the other standouts include Mo cheol Thú, the Irish for I love you, or you are my darling, and the closer, The Rest of Our Lives, a bittersweet acceptance that being a musician, she must endure long absence from her true love, but with a mature sense of having the rest of their lives to be together. Wonderfully moving. Out on City Slang.
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