Martin Craft’s craft here is not so much in song writing, but rather draping tapestries of dust and mysticism over what are otherwise simple melodies. This may just be a love-song, thematically one you’ve heard four thousand times over and lyrically a little hit and miss: “there’s nothing quite as beautiful as your light”, “the hours that pass in a moment so sublime” and so on with more hallucinations of the horribly love-struck mind. M Craft is not disgustingly love-struck though, this is no Blunt-like ‘You’re Beautiful’, Craft’s voice is hushed, suggestive and just spectral enough to carry off the piled-up romances.
What Craft has weaved around the song is the attraction here; guitars recorded to sound tangibly close, thick and surrounding; distant buzzing clicks and scrapes; flute creating birdsong so delicate, it must belong to some secret valley. It’s the secretive atmosphere that flashes back images of auburn and viridian shaded glades, places visited far back in the past whose locations are forgotten. Streams where you could walk barefoot on the malachite stone riverbed, dense evergreen trees hiding everything-else in the world from your view. The close, fuzzy noises have much in common with Adem’s home-recording, but the mysterious unreal sensation dates further back to acid-drenched folk and the work of Linda Perhacs or Bonnie Koloc. Still, I keep flicking through the old photographs to try and find the secret places I half-remember.
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7Rachel Cawley's Score