Ralegh Long - Upwards of Summer (2017)

Ralegh Long's second full-length album Upwards of Summer marks a change of pace. The piano, strings and woodwind of his 2015 debut Hoverance are nowhere to be seen, exchanged for the jangle of chorus guitars, mandolins and anthemic hooks in a thrilling, confident album. Themes of freedom and frustration are wrapped in exhilarating power-pop with magnificently crafted arrangements, neatly combining the fragile pastoral beauty of his previous material with deliciously woozy psychedelic country-rock.

Teaming up with producer Margo Broom (Fat White Family, Phobophobes and Goat- Girl), Long cut the album in a week at Margo's Hermitage Works Studios in North London. It was recorded with his touring band, including Hefner's Jack Hayter on Pedal Steel who, alongside Long's vocal and lyrical tics, represents the most obvious continuation from Hoverance. He was also joined by Will Lamport on drums, Harpal Mudhar on percussion and drums and Richard Ellis on bass, whilst Long played mandolin, guitars and keyboards. The new album found its gestation during heavy touring in 2016, in a period of change during which Long says he was "unsure if he was even going to carry on making music. By the time he got back to England and started writing the album, he says he just "remembered what it was like to pick up a guitar for the first time, and tapped into that place of instinct".

Opener "Take Your Mind Back" sets the scene, located on a flight back from Japan; "Watching the sun rising on a distant curve". Album highlight "Big August" was a late, largely improvised addition to the album. It presents a Robyn Hitchcock- esque sea of imagery, describing the buzz of summer with; "Bugs the size of my feet / when they're in their shoes". "Take It" continues the theme of travel in a tale of the unravelling of family dynamics on a plane into Norway, where Long sees "everything reflected in a rivalry", declaring "you to me are dearer than I let you be / I was pinioned by the voices of conformity".

By the end of the album, the focus returns home, in the fields of "The Combine" and the plea to "take it back" in "Home". "Home" sums up the conflicts of the album, of escape and return, youth and age in its opening lines; "There's something inside you, inside the night / a sense of leaving, come back / to an old house, when you were younger."