Seafarers - Orlando (2020)

Led by Scottish Royal Academy alumni songwriter and saxophonist Matthew Herd and featuring the award-winning Lauren Kinsella on vocals (Snowpoet), composer Tom Taylor on keys with guitarist Innes White, double bassist Tom McCredie and drummer Dave Hamblett completing the lineup, as the title suggests, their debut album draws on Virginia Woolf’s novel of self-liberation for inspiration.

The Seafarers collectively have a background in both folk and jazz and the latter influence is prominent here, at times evocative of Antony and the Johnsons or Joni Mitchell circa Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hijira. Opening with the airy sounds of the 65-second piano backed A Day Like Any Other, you might also detect shades of the early Scott Walker solo albums as Kinsella sings of light breaking over Muswell Hill.

Following the brief introduction, they launch into the full six minutes of The Lighthouse (possibly another Woolf reference?), nervy piano setting the mood for a number about romantic longing (“For all the years I’ve sailed the seas/In the hope you might come after me”) that remain unfulfilled (“these dreams are little fictions”) coloured by Phillip Cardwell’s trumpet.

Reflection and memories also inhabit the pulsing piano notes of Hamelin (as in the legend of the Pied Piper), opening with the sadness-infused lines “Four and twenty days ago/I saw you at a funeral/ n bygone years you set me free/Now I live alone in old memories”, ending with the image of betrayal in “I trusted your eyes/But you clipped my wings as I made to fly”.

A similar musical ambience enfolds the airiness of the softly almost distractedly sung Wider Spaces with its domestic imagery of laying the table for dinner subtly hinting at a fractured family with the cracked plates and how “we’re all splitting at the seams/No one talk about their dreams”.

Birdsong heralds the hymnal-like piano introduction to the melancholic instrumental A Life Without which serves as a prelude to the slow waltzing Virgin Soil where, coloured by trumpet, trombone and clarinet, the lyrics pick up the image with references to stained glass, organs and chapel stalls, a song that would seem to be about a parent or mentor’s funeral (“the soil fills your mouth/And the roots drag you down” in a return to the land “as the garden takes hold”.

Euan Burton on Moog bass, And Maybe I’m Scared is a more jittery, percussive track with its poetic lyric of teenage runaways memories and dreams of better promises, again, of experiencing loss and loneliness (“Word’s that bind/Liar’s thread/On your empty bunk/I banged my head”). Then, again featuring trombone, trumpet and Moog bass and spoken accompaniment, You, Asleep In The Morning returns to calmer climes, albeit the words involve the image of a maggot-infested dead bird bringing back memories of a frayed relationship (“we were sleeping then on separate sheets.. and I was never one to speak, nor try to make amends”), before finally ending, back in the shared flat, with some sort of reconciliation and the confession “I always, always loved you and never knew what to do”.

It closes with Reprise, a five minute plus return to the opening track with changed words (and an extended, instrumental play out conjuring the twilight quiet as night gives way to the dawn, Herd’s sax to the forefront with rumbling drums, White on mandolin and McReadie on electric guitar, a soothing reverie despite the ominous doom foreshadowing second verse. A highly accomplished, subtly emotional and beautifully textured debut, here’s hoping there are many voyages ahead.