A long-in-the-pipeline new album from Fuzzy Lights and an old-but-refreshed one from Sennen spread out into broad yet firmly-rooted vistas

Letting things sprawl out whilst remaining resolutely focused is a fine balancing act. However, for those with the ambition and agility to reconcile such contrary impulses, the artistic rewards are there for the taking. Something that these two long players – respectively brand new and relaunched – assuredly attest.

Ending a long hiatus comes Burials, the fourth album from Cambridge’s Fuzzy Lights (Meadows Records). Not that the band’s married co-leaders have been idle during the time since 2013’s Rule of Twelfths LP; with Xavier Watkins having psych-pop detours with Violet Woods and Red Red Eyes as well as modular synth explorations as Twenty-Three Hanging Trees and Rachel Watkins delivering an impressive solo album. In fact, it’s off the back of the latter release – 2019’s Collectanea – that Burials springs forth, with three of its songs radically rebuilt and expanded upon as fully-plugged-in ensemble pieces.

Also finding Xavier standing down from his shared singing duties, to concentrate on galvanising twinning guitar work with fellow axe-wielder Chris Rogers, the long player is very much forged around Rachel’s vocals, lyrics and violin lines. This allows the group – rounded-out by bassist Daniel Carney and drummer Mark Blay – to stretch out dynamically from a very strong core. The net result is something that impressively imagines what might have happened had Sandy Denny lived well into the 2000s to be creatively rebooted by reuniting to record with the Liege & Leif-era Fairport Convention line-up as well as drafting in – rather improbably – members of Sonic Youth, Dirty Three and Bardo Pond as extra guest players.

Over just the first two tracks Fuzzy Lights pull together these strong stylistic strands with enough epic gusto to be worth the admission price alone. This means that the painfully personal opening of “The Maiden’s Call” potently packs in the instrumental trademarks of Dave Swarbrick, Richard Thompson and Lee Ranaldo whilst the turbulent “Songbird” fuses lysergic Gibbons brothers six-string bending, Steve Shelley percussion propulsion and Warren Ellis string swirls into ten tremendous minutes.

Similar patterns are repeated and reworked across the remaining pieces. This means veering through the dainty-to-muscular arrangements of “The Graveyard Song”; the languid breathing space of “Haraldskær Woman”; the symphonic swerving and clattering of both “Under the Waves” and “Sirens”; and the aptly anointed slow-smouldering egress of “The Gathering Storm”.

Undoubtedly, this is a record that grows gratifyingly in stature with successive rotations. Moreover, despite its dark content and title, Burials unfurls as a rousing re-start for Fuzzy Lights.

With some surprise and mild embarrassment to this record collecting omnivore, the Norwich-born Sennen have previously passed these ears by. On reflection though, many of us could probably be forgiven for missing the band’s arrival with Widows – newly expanded and reissued by Sonic Cathedral – the first time it appeared in 2005.

Arriving a little too late to be part of the British post-rock micro-boom and a tad too early for the wider reawakening of the shoegaze world, the still-active Sennen may once have fallen between two stools. Yet now, in more the open-eared – at least in a musical sense – times, the band’s bridging between the two such schools of sonic thought feels remarkably fresh.

However, it’s not merely the genre hybridisation exercises that makes the wonderfully wide-open Widows sound so sublime in 2021. It’s also about the songcraft and the tender tones of frontman Richard Kelleway, that somewhat surprisingly blends the bittersweet melodic charms of Sloan’s Jay Ferguson and Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love into the largely experimentally environs.

Over the seven original album tracks it’s not hard to hear why Sonic Cathedral sought to put the album – thoughtfully remastered by Slowdive’s Simon Scott – back into enhanced print. From the drowsy, chiming and commanding prologue of the eight-minute “I Couldn’t Tell You”, Widows sucks you into an immersive headspace.

Thereafter, comes the Painful-era Yo La Tengo motorik-bliss of “Opened Up My Arms”; the yearning tiered churn of “Laid Out”; warm nods to the quietest moments of early Mogwai on “All the Time”; the swelling Ride-meets-Spiritualized space-rock tripping “It’s Not Like It Used to Be” bleeding into the JAMC-vs-MBV white noise queasiness of “One and the Same Thing”; and the stately yet whirling grandeur of the title track.

Whilst the seven additional bonus tracks appended to this extended edition – recorded at the same sessions – are perhaps more uneven, they should satisfy existing fans and latecomers alike with some added archivist value. Highlights amongst these extras include the plaintive pirouetting of “Next Day”, the scything chug of “I Knew a Girl” and the rippling stomping Souvlaki-via-Bandwagonesque balm of “Forty Years”.

An unexpected treat all told, that deepens Sonic Cathedral’s connections with its spiritual roots and which brings another should-have-been-bigger lost nugget back into accessible reach.

Adrian
Latest posts by Adrian (see all)