The first time Nailah Hunter fell in love with the harp, so the story goes, it wasn’t a simple infatuation with the instrument itself. It wasn’t even just the sound of the thing, or its exquisite geometry – all arched columns and crossbars sculpted from maple or Finnish birchwood – but the associated mythology. Fantasy, folklore, and mystical paeans to the natural world felt like an easy fit, a collection of vaguely spiritual tropes that quickly became woven through the LA-based artist’s own work. On her debut album, ‘Lovegaze’, the question isn’t where those themes might fit into a collection of ambient and folk-inspired songs, but how to avoid the whole project lapsing into cliché entirely.
On the record’s gorgeous first single, ‘Finding Mirrors’, an answer seems to present itself. The hushed, synth-driven chord sequence in the chorus would feel irresistible in any setting, but the addition of a trap beat elevates it to another level, evoking the best genre work of soprano vocalists emoting over moody soundscapes before her: FKA twigs, Anna von Hausswolff, Zola Jesus. It’s a rich lineage, and at the album’s most dramatic moments – including the gloriously operatic title track, and the elegiac ‘Adorned’ – Hunter makes a compelling case to be included in that company. After a string of tour dates supporting Julie Byrne in the US last year, another artist capable of majestic songwriting in hymn to loss and the vanishing earth, she seems to be largely on the right track.
As with the twin EPs that preceded it, however, the glimpses of originality strewn across ‘Lovegaze’ are too often sparse islands in a sea of pleasant but generic etherea. ‘Garden’ and the instrumental ‘Cloudbreath’ would potentially work well on an album that required more breathing space from sharper contrasts elsewhere; placed together in an otherwise unremarkable run of tracks, instead they simply feel lightweight. Closing track ‘Into The Sun’ throws some much-needed colour and intrigue to the album’s lyrics, Hunter spinning yarns about dreams of “beheadings and goose-feather bedding”, but just as it threatens to swell into something grander, the tide retreats once more, and the opportunity slides by.
If this is what her fantasy sounds like, it’s one that’s mostly been told in more lush and verdant sonic landscapes elsewhere, in tales that bypass plaintive gestures to the natural world and become something vital. A promising debut album, then, with scintillating nods to the artist Hunter might yet become, one perhaps ready to write her own mythologies.
6/10
Words: Matthew Neale
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