VASHTI BUNYAN - Lookaftering

To get lost in the folds of time, to remain a delight for a devoted few and unknown to most: this has been, and still is, the fate of many records.

Until, one day, someone with the credibility and the means to spread the word gets hold of one, listens to it, is left in awe, and starts championing it.

That's exactly what happened with "Just Another Diamond Day", the first and (so far) only work by Vashti Bunyan, a singer almost by accident, a folksinger by vocation, with a voice that's sweet and lost, pastoral and, today more than ever, out of time.

A full 35 years on, word of mouth, collaborations with Piano Magic, Devendra Banhart and Animal Collective, and above all the fact that that first record was, in all honesty, a great record, turn out to be the ideal conditions for conceiving a second chapter.

And so "Lookaftering" is born: born without shifting Bunyan's art by so much as a comma, born to once again wrap the fortunate listener in her grace and tenderness, as if time itself had stood still.

"Lookaftering" consists of eleven tracks, but it's really a single continuous flow, where the songs aren't really songs so much as states of mind, caresses, quiet corners, often mere sketches, where joy prevails but a few moments of pain are never far away.

It's simply the enchantment of life, distilled yet honest, pouring out of Bunyan's voice.

Contributing to this flowing effect is the album's sound: piano, guitar, flutes, harp (played by the hugely talented Joanna Newsom: if you missed her "The Milk-Eyed Mender" from last year, go and track it down immediately) and violins overlapping and replacing one another from track to track, serving either as arrangement or as the main melodic line.

The album opens with "Lately", little more than a guitar-and-voice intro, over whose gait a few low-key violins settle in, its central section adorned by a flute. It's a pleasant calling card, nothing more: but little by little, you'll find yourself caught up in a crescendo of delicate emotion.

"Here Before" and "Wayward" are really just two more sketches tacked onto the opening track, and it's here that the listener truly begins to be swept away: the first offers up an utterly pure melody (the most folk-leaning of the bunch) and shimmering chimes, while the second is a soft breath (indeed it will return in song form, transformed into a whisper, at the close of the album) that stirs awake in its instrumental finale, embellished by a shimmering slide guitar.

"Hidden" delivers the final blow, a piano ballad brimming with love and dispensing lightness, underscored by overlapping horns in simply wonderful fashion.

"Against the Sky", on the other hand, is one of the album's more inward-turning moments: melancholy and closed in on itself. It's the track needed to push the emotional tension to its peak before "Turning Backs" arrives. A long (by the album's standards) and slow folk digression that releases the listener by flowing into an instrumental refrain made of chiming guitar and flute melody.

Once the song has passed, the sketches return: the harp takes center stage in the tender, heartfelt "If I Were" (we're still close to the album's peak, qualitatively speaking too), while "Same But Different" is the most aching track of the bunch, likewise carried by a flute melody and arranged with violins and piano, while the guitar holds the threads together.

"Brother", reflective and understated, carries us instead into the album's second proper song, "Feet of Clay", which boasts a crystalline piano melody.

Everything then fades away, with delicacy, into the second version of "Wayward".

Vashti Bunyan once again proves herself an artist capable of casting a spell, transporting listeners into a world bordering on enchantment, brimming with life and joy.

One can only hope the effect lingers a little longer than the album's (fittingly) brief half hour running time.

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01/06/2005