Northern actress Keeley Forsyth lays bare her own character in the grainy dramas of this compelling debut album for The Leaf Label

The transition from stage and screen to recording studio is not always a safe bet. For every Juliette Lewis or  Zooey Deschanel, there’s a whole wardrobe of others whose vaulting ambition o’erleaps itself and falls rather flat. Northern actress Keeley Forsyth had carved out a fair career in plays and TV, whilst writing songs on the quiet, until Maxine Peake introduced her to the Eccentronic Research Council. Despite sounding like a Ballardian think tank, the ERC is actually an analogue synth trio who encouraged Forsyth to keep composing. Then she came across the Leeds-based pianist Matthew Bourne with whom a series of collaborations began. The award-winning Bourne is also signed to The Leaf Label and his influence on Forsyth’s debut is profound. Check out his alluring Nightports w/Matthew Bourne album for an emotive mix of synthesised edits and vintage piano sounds. Bourne’s canny use of stillness and eruptions is also echoed in Forsyth’s songs, often to disquieting effect. Both artists understand the drama of silence within works of emotional frenzy.

Forsyth began writing to accordion and harmonium backing, which suggests this album could’ve been a direct companion for Maja SK Ratkje’s steampunky Sult. But even if the synths on Debris offer a modern sheen, much of this record speaks of music born from a dark antiquity, much like Ratkje’s. Forsyth’s voice is something of a revelation too with its operatic bluesy croon. Very often she seems to be singing half aloud and half to herself. Nico and Aldous Harding are clear lodestars, but you can throw Sybille Baier, Julia Jacklin and Haley Fohr into the mix, alongside the pained grandeur of kd lang’s delivery.

After years of inhabiting other people’s characters, Forsyth now gets a chance to expose her own. She’s compared these tracks to “blocks of metal dropped from the sky” and they do convey the heavy burden of relationships and life itself. A sense of loss for someone, or something, is palpable throughout. The title track opener bears a grey chill of piano chords and warming strings, as Forsyth’s dusky voice takes a confessional tone. Some lute-like guitar meets a keening cello on “Black Bull” where landscapes are portrayed in sparse stanzas: “Sit beneath the estuary / Salt hills running next to me… White shower / Hail the hills / Black mountains”. More cello frissons then feature on “It’s Raining” as Forsyth stares down both external elements and internal doubts. By now you sense there’s little or no thespian trickery in this performance.

The human flaw of guitar fretbuzz only adds to the wider fragility of “Look to Yourself”. Forsyth repeatedly sighs, “For we are only human” on this piece whilst sounding almost disembodied. Her northern accent pops up later in “Lost” among the paranoid poetics of another grainy lullaby: “The floor is hard and begging you to fall… I am blind / Hurt beyond help”. There might be wolves at her door but Forsyth isn’t backing down yet, even if requiem-style keyboards on the eerily catchy “Butterfly” are quite fearsome.

We reach closure with “Start Again” which gets a dystopian wash over rapid heartbeat pulses. An emotive synth swell adds lustre to Forsyth’s exalted cries, “Oh Lord, where should I go… Where can I find you?” Further in, this final sung spell brings a murmured mantra that’s both gothic and gospel, full of tension and release.

Even though it’s wracked with much personal confusion, what you take from Forsyth’s debut isn’t the darkness. Debris might be born of a crumbling mind, but it feels truly alive with rugged beauty.

keeleyforsyth.bandcamp.com

Gareth Thompson