A gorgeously delicate, stripped-back noir folk release by the Melbourne singer-songwriter with her first LP since 2019, an album about isolation, loss, tiny snatches of love and instability, written when she lived in nine places over a two-year period. There’s beautiful atmospheric unease and spookiness to this release, the songs conceived with her friend Dave Mudie (Courtney Barnett, Super American Eagle) and recorded with Nick Huggins on Wadawurrung Country in Point Lonsdale with special guests Jim White on drums, Darcy McNulty on saxophone, folk-diviner Leah Senior on keyboards, James Seymour on bass, and Mudie on percussion, Carrie Webster on violin and viola, and Huggins on a variety of acoustic instruments. Each musician is admirably restrained as Ribeiro’s voice hovers delicately from the gentle piano chords of opener Maybe If I Wore Sunglasses I Won’t Feel Tired, the wonderful melody of Everything Is Now, the backline and strings pushing a steady tempo with wild flourishes of woodwind while Ribeiro’s voice gentle whispers through it. The Trees And Me is a dark, almost bluesy number, Paradise a dreamy folk song with breezy stirrings of drums and strings, while Jump The Gun is a thrumming track with a sense of foreboding, a mood that is especially captured on the delivery and lyrics of Howl. The title track is of course not, but one of isolation and grief, but no less beautiful for it. Within this minimalist approach, across different instruments there’s real range of sounds and moods, a playing out of innocence and experience, with some symmetry - images of children frolicking on two contrasting tracks - staccato strings building intensely on Helicopter and the more serene, melancholy of drifting piano on Wake in Fright. An artist with great presence, stillness and subtlety, control of mood and sensivity making a welcome return. Out on Labelman Records.
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