The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to REM to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory.
The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in The Bricks That Make the Building, a sweet, psych-folk jewel which meditates on “the earth that feeds the garden / The breath that helps the child sing” and Gently Now, which begins in soft clouds of birdsong, then tackles how growing older can cosset the process of grief. Her approach to the subject is inquisitive, poetic and refreshing.
Poppier production buoys this album’s spry limbs. Fear Bangs the Drum and Wild Geese play like confident cousins of singles by This Is the Kit or Aldous Harding, while Built to Collide, driven forward by percussive violin shivers and pacy drums, is catnip for radio. Jackson’s voice, assured but never smug, is captivating too, floating between delicacy and spirited sprechgesang. It’s most potent in simpler songs such as the piano-led Grace Notes, the final track Prizefighter, and the beautiful By Morning, led by an opening guitar melody that arrives like a Paul Simon classic. It’s a luminous rebirth.
Also out this month
Produced by Philip Weinrobe (Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker), the fourth album by Irish folk band Ye Vagabonds, All Tied Together (River Lea), thrums with slow-burning, moving songs. Arresting characters pop out of the mists frequently, such as the “troubled teens and drag queens” of On Sitric Road, youths “swimming in a river of smoke and serotonin” in The Flood, and Mayfly’s “grey-eyed” Mary, who smiled when she didn’t think she was being watched, “like she had nothing left to hide”. Adam Weikert’s To Whom Ourselves We Owe (self-released) is an engagingly gutsy and noisy exploration of traditional songs: Farewell to the Green Man makes merry with a practice chanter and Thai gongs, while Greensleeves gets transported to eerie, barren landscapes on a musical saw. If you fancy even wilder boundary-pushing, Nomad War Machine and Susan Alcorn’s Contra Madre (self-released) mix the late pedal steel player’s talents, thrillingly, with death metal.
