Winter is a time for sitting at a warming fireside and dreaming and Quiet Light, the 3rd album from Bristol-based psych-folk trio, Hands Of The Heron, is the perfect accompaniment to that contemplative activity.
Release Date: 22nd November 2024
Label: Cuculi Records
Formats: CD / Digital
INTENSITY, INTIMACY AND OTHERWORLDLY EMOTIONS
Quiet Light is the 3rd album from Bristol-based psych-folk trio, Hands Of The Heron, and follows the band’s previous offerings, 13 Moons (2021) and their 2017 debut, As We Lingered. Hands Of The Heron have been through a number of iterations since they formed, back in 2017 and have now settled on a stable 3-piece lineup comprising Bec Garthwaite (vocals and guitars), Beth Roberts (vocals, acoustic guitar, banjo, double bass, violin and shaker) and Claire Vine (vocals, clarinet and harmonium).
styles that blend seamlessly
The ladies are all accomplished writers and, for Quiet Light, they’ve shared the compositional credits around fairly evenly and, as each of the girls offers a particular writing style, that makes for a wonderfully balanced, well-rounded album. Claire, for example, tends to lean towards the bleaker end of the folk tradition for her musical and lyrical inspirations, whilst Beth’s writing is more jazz-inclined and Bec favours the alt-pop influences of artists like Laura Marling and Bedouine. The styles blend together seamlessly and the result is an album packed with intensity, intimacy and otherworldly emotions.
Speaking of that blend, Beth comments: “[We] complete each other’s songs. We have ideas that are bigger than what any of us can do individually and we transform them together. When one of us brings the seed of an idea to the other two, it already contains the potential for the whole – we start from these specific strands of poetry and melody and then the arranging is done as a collective. Some of the songs are hugely transformed in the process but we stay true to the feeling of the initial idea, shaping the arrangement around the original concept to fully express its themes.”
THE TENTATIVE EMERGENCE OF HOPE
Quiet Light reflects the individual struggles that each of the songwriters has experienced over recent years, including burnout and recovery, care and struggle, solitude and friendship, sorrow and acceptance and the songs’ lyrics consistently describe images of water, light, shadow and the interplay between those elements to produce a mosaic of ‘quiet light’ to suggest the tentative emergence of hope.
CROSBY, STILS AND NASH, REIMAGINED AS ANGELS
The arrival of Quiet Light has been generously heralded by four singles, released over a period of almost four months, and it is the second of these, Evergreen, that gets the album underway. The song was brought to the band by Beth and, speaking of the emotions and texts that inspired the song, she said: “Evergreen arrived whilst I was recovering from a breakdown and reconnecting withy myself, others and the natural world. It was partly inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s writings in The Prophet… and I was discovering that my capacity to find joy and meaning was greater than it had been before I got ill, but so was my appetite for desire and solitude.”
It’s a song that serves accurate notice of what to expect from Quiet Light, with a pared-back banjo accompaniment creating the canvas for the girls’ heavenly voices to weave in, out and around each other like celestial sirens. Imagine Crosby, Stills and Nash reimagined as angels, and you’ll get the idea…
mellow and warming
Pared-back, but perfectly-formed accompaniments are a feature of Quiet Light and it’s acoustic guitar and subtle bass that fulfill that role on Bec’s gentle, rich, folky Making Space. The harmonies are mellow and warming and it occurred to me that this is the perfect antidote to the British winter – music to sit by a fireside and dream along to.
There’s a slight touch of blues to Claire’s Dearie and the vulnerability in her vocals is only partially offset by Bec’s and Beth’s harmonies, before we go fully acapella for the gorgeous Aquamarine, the first of half a dozen unaccompanied songs on the album and the most recent of the four singles. Described a “…a choral psychedelic hymn,” it’s one of several dreamlike songs on the album and has a distinct Celtic feel. And, as the girls sing “I get so lost in the echoes of you,” you’ll find that you have no option, other than to lose yourself as well.
WELCOME TO DREAMLAND
Single #3, Pieces of Me, has been described as “…a moody dreamscape of electric guitar, strings and vocals,” and, apart from the ‘moody’ bit, that’s a description with which I can agree wholeheartedly – to me, it comes across as soft, intimate and so very, very dreamy. Inspired by Claire’s experiences of burnout and trauma, it’s a song that she’s been working with for a number of years.
Claire takes up the story: “…I’d been in Athens for nearly a year, volunteering with asylum seekers and refugees. I was surrounded by a lot of trauma and felt compelled to help in any way I could, so I completely overworked myself until I was totally burnt out. When I came home, I was exhausted, depressed and had taken on what I now know as secondary trauma. I didn’t have any language to express how I was feeling or understand how to make myself better and didn’t feel like I deserved support, as I had chosen to put myself in that situation. The song emerged from that place in lots of fragments…”
speaking of dreamy music…
…Beth’s Which Waters is, just maybe, the dreamiest of the lot. Claire plays her clarinet – always a good idea on an album of such gentle complexity – as Beth sings along to an acoustic guitar backing, and the vocal harmonies ensure that the dreamscapes just keep on coming. The harmonies are delivered with the lightest of touches – indeed, in some places, they’re almost whispered – on Boat Song, the song which, probably more so than any other on the album, wears its traditional roots proudly and the trio sound like a fully-populated choir as they hit their stride with more delicious harmonies.
improvised
There are no lyrics to the improvised Lament For Palestine but the haunting vocals nevertheless deliver a potent message, before Beth’s reassuring lyrics to Lullaby For A Friend are given a joyful bounce by Bec’s and Claire’s wordless harmonies.
Bec describes lead single, Picturing Myself, as “An expression of my desire to follow a different path from what was expected of me – including by my younger self. The song describes the slow process of forging one’s identity and the natural periods of self-questioning that lead to transformation and growth. It weaves together these queries about my place in the world with images of my changing identity, as I’ve started to become OK with the unknown.” Acoustic guitar, harmonium and softly-plucked bass set the scene for a song with slight jazzy edge which tumbles along smoothly like a softly-flowing mountain stream.
LET THE VOICES WRAP THEMSELVES AROUND YOU…
The girls’ voices are softer than ever for Half Moon Horizon, and they interweave so effortlessly that the song almost becomes a round, and the “Rising, rising” coda becomes quite dramatic as the intensity of the song reaches its climax. And that just leaves us with the album’s title track – the second of the vocal improvisations on the album. My recommendation to the listener: Imagine yourself in the cloisters of an almost-deserted cathedral and allow these divine voices to wrap themselves around you.
Hands Of The Heron have something very, very special on offer. Quiet Light is very, very special.
Watch the official video to Picturing Myself, the album’s lead single, here:
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