If you’re new to the music of Julianna Barwick then I would recommend giving it a try, particularly if you’re in the mood where you need some space to dive in to! Barwick makes unusually big music, and makes it mostly through the use of her multitracked voice. If that makes you think of 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’, though, it’s very different to that, and becomes really eerie and otherworldly at times, literally as if a voice is singing to you from the heavens. With all that said it’s not much of a surprise to find she recorded it in Reykjavik, Iceland, and that influenced a lot of the music Barwick makes here, along with the process of coming to terms with a death in the family. Alex Somers (the Sigur Rós producer) is in the studio here, and it shows in the slow moving piano of ‘The Harbinger’, or the plucked violin that sounds like huge rain spots on ‘Adventurer Of The Family’. This is consoling music of heart piercing beauty, that really does take the listener to another place, a place beyond ambience. That reason alone gives it full marks!
5 out of 5
Reviewed By Ben Hogwood
