The British folk singer-songwriter, best known for The Detectorists theme song, returns with a gorgeous, bucolically beautiful fourth LP, swelled by orchestral strings, with songs of love, loss, Albion-tinged melancholy with ecological disaster looming. It’s very much an expanded sound on the more stripped back guitar folk of the past, Lee’s rich baritone hovers like a fluttering kestrel amidst whispering meadows of strings, piano, trombone, French horn, Arabic qanun, Swedish nyckelharpa, small pipes, and more, including subtle electric guitar by producer Bernard Butler, whose arrangements decorated Lee’s 2020 album, Old Wow, and of course long-term collaborator, arranger, and composer James Keay. There’s delicate, rich, fragile beauty throughout, from the opener Bushes and Briars, to Meeting Is A Pleasant Place (featuring Trans Choir) and Green Mossy Banks, with a summary couplet such as “To face the uncertain / To attend to lost loves and landlines.” Aye Walking On is a seven-minute slow number that begins unaccompanied, gradually building with a real power. Profound and dynamic, a peach of an album, from first to last, Sweet Girl McRee (from the film The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry). Out on Cooking Vinyl.
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