Not so long ago, Kathryn Williams was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize with her album Little Black Numbers. But a few years have passed since then, and Kathryn Williams has made Leave To Remain – an album that surpasses Little Black Numbers for sheer aching loveliness in every possible way imaginable.
Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is an album that drips with restrained autumnal beauty, from the songwriting to the production to the crystal whisper of Kathryn Williams herself. We're loopy about Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams, can you tell?
Common consensus is that Kathryn Williams doesn't like her music to be called folk, but it's a tag she's going to have to make do with until someone finds a better way to describe the gorgeous music on Leave To Remain. Musically, Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is most closely related to Rejoicing In The Hands/Nino Rojo-era Devendra Banhart, and he's kind of folky, isn't he? In fact, the relationship between Kathryn Williams and Devendra Banhart doesn't just end there – even the artwork for Leave To Remain manages to out-Banhart Banhart. Leave To Remain, though, is an album which deserves to be judged entirely on its own merits, so let's do that.
Leave To Remain is just as striking for its space as it is for any noise you'll hear on it – the whole album is as spare and lovely as you'd hope, with Kathryn Williams leaving the listener hanging on every last word and note from start to finish. Guitars chime, pianos tinkle and the occasional trumpet or viola will crop up here and there to support Kathryn Williams' voice, which remains as crystalline and still as a creek hidden in a forest. Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is a beautiful, delicate record that never loses its sense of humanity.
Unsurprisingly for a woman who is happy to discuss babies coming out of her arse in interviews, Kathryn Williams' lyrics on Leave To Remain are endearingly batty. On Leave To Remain opener Blue Onto You, Kathryn is quick to gently assert that "Blue doesn't really exist." Before you can work out whether she's talking about defunct boyband Blue or the actual colour blue (which does exist – hecklerspray is sitting on a blue chair at a blue desk with a blue stapler on it and a blue ethernet cable coming out of our laptop in a room with a blue carpet. We can take a picture to prove it, Kathryn), Kathryn Williams' voice has burst into harmonies shooting off into a million different directions that hit you in the gut like a battering ram. It's a moment to cherish, but it isn't the only highpoint on Leave To Remain by any means.
While songs like Sandy L and Stevie sketch out snatches of incidents and personalities, always leaving enough room for your imagination to fill in the blanks, the one outstanding track on Leave To Remain is Glass Bottom Boat, a song that sounds like one of Aphex Twin's dips into ambient piano work from his Drukqs album. It's so ornate that it hardly sounds real, until Williams sneaks in her lyrics, about a man who sees "everything I hide but still keeps me afloat." Glass Bottom Boat also benefits from it's imagery; at one point Kathryn Williams sings "we're as tired as rock pools" – a line as perfect as you're ever likely to hear.
Coming directly after Glass Bottom Boat on Leave To Remain, recent Kathryn Williams single Hollow sounds almost vulgar with all of its lush instrumentation. It's not, of course, it's a slice of country-brushed folk that tugs at the heartstrings just as much as any of the other songs on this dazzling album.
Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams might not be nominated for a Mercury Music Prize any time soon, but it is going to have the rare honour of being the only album we'll listen to to wake us up every Sunday morning from now until Christmas. And you can keep your £20,000 cheques compared to a distinction like that.
Now buy Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams at Amazon
[story by Stuart Heritage]
Melissa says
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