The folk-pop singer’s charming, melancholy LP has a rather beautiful ghostly, disembodied quality, lacking only old ‘78 vinyl crackles, but delicately gorgeous with her clear, distinctive voice, guitar and Omnichord accompaniment. Raised in Virginia but now based in Los Angeles for a decade, Lael’s opening tracks Blue Vein and Every Star Shivers In The Dark typify that simple but effective formula, her songs sounding like a old sepia photograph. The title track and How Far Is It to the Grave are beautifully sad and macabre with ripples of notes like bones rattling, while White Wings is bathed in an inherent hiss over her instrument, like a recording from 100 years before. For No One For Now has a very basic drum machine beat to accompany those chords, and is the closest to dance music she’ll ever come. Sliding Doors & Warm Summer Roses contain jittering whistles and twitterings that capture a lost summer of distant memory like a fragile butterfly. All 10 tracks keep this same faded-glory quality, like museum artefacts newly discovered, and joyfully beheld. Gloriously low-key, Lael Neale is a cross between Australia’s Julia Jacklin and an angelic Ivor Cutler, charming like the old Scottish surrealist, but a far more serious songwriting prospect. Beautiful. Out on Sub Pop.
Feel free to also check out our favourite albums of 2020 here:
Fiona Apple to Lianne La Havas to Yves Tumor: favourite albums of 2020 – Part 1
Agnes Obel to Bob Dylan, Phoebe Bridgers to Sault: favourite albums of 2020 – Part 2
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