Douban: Lookaftering

It's not often you come across an artist you can genuinely refer to as a "cult legend," but Vashti Bunyan is truly that. A full thirty-five years after her only previous album, the singer returns with a new solo work, her first in all these years, and it is a breathtakingly beautiful album.

Produced by fellow Edinburgh resident Max Richter (who has a wonderful solo album of his own, Blue Notebooks), and co-arranged with Bunyan, it's a rich, beautifully arranged and stirring album. Developing gradually and organically -- with work initially taking place between Richter and Bunyan's homes, and then at various studios in Edinburgh, London and Glasgow -- Lookaftering is anchored around Bunyan's voice and picked acoustic guitar, Richter's piano playing and arranging. Its instrumentation includes a string quartet, oboe, harp, French horn, and recorder, flute, hammer dulcimer, glasses, harmonium, and Rhodes piano, and it features contributions from Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Adem, Adam Pierce (Mice Parade), Robert Kirby (Nick Drake), Otto Hauser and Kevin Barker (Espers, Currituck County)

As well as a neat balance between gentle, sparse songs and heavier, more orchestrated numbers, there is a beautiful play between the lush instrumental arrangements and the incredibly intimate, in-your-ear presence of Bunyan's voice. There's a real honesty to the album -- from the fragile intimacy of the vocal itself to the stories that it weaves. Just as JADD was a very pure document of a journey, Lookaftering is similarly based on stories taken directly from lived experience (the death of a brother; the joys and fears of motherhood; the tension between freedom and commitment; and travel versus domesticity). There's also a great integrity forged from the cohesiveness between lyrical content and musical form (the gentle rolling and pitching of the melodies on "Same But Different"; the vocal roundelay on "Here Before"; the ice-shiver of dulcimer on "Turning Backs"). The album title itself, a personal neologism that describes the role of "taking care of someone -- human or animal -- or even something that needs to be done, that needs lookaftering."

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