Review Summary: Wake up babe, ‘best new music’ folk album dropped
We last caught up with Sam Lee back in 2020 with the quietly revelatory ‘Old Wow’, a set of reimagined folk standards given new life thanks to some surprising but no less sympathetic arrangements and performances. The headline difference on this follow up is (and I had to look this up to know for sure) that all these songs are originals, and that’s admittedly a huge change; can his own writing conjure up the same authentic and timeless quality?
The answer is a resounding ‘yes’, a more emphatic one than I would perhaps have expected. These songs carry an instant weight, they feel somehow aged and important, and the vocals frequently emphasise a near hymnal quality. The compositions are in no way stuffy however, and in particular Mr Impeccable Taste himself, Bernard Butler, is here yet again providing string arrangements for an album by a talented song writer.
Similar to ‘Old Wow’ the influences remain ‘Ys’ era Joanna Newsom (that same ‘ye olde’ whimsy, wandering and sometimes grandiose compositions), Benjamin Clementine (the more theatrical qualities to both the singing and the orchestral additions) and Nick Drake (the quieter stretches of folk here, and the more dulcet register of the vocals). Of course this is great company to keep and Lee is arriving at the stage it feels like he belongs; the consistency of his writing is disarming, the emotion in this music tangible.
Will another work this year move so effortlessly between hushed intimacy and grand swells? In lesser hands this type of material could have landed in ‘identity crisis’ territory, or worse flattened out into a one paced dirge; quite simply with ‘Songdreaming’ Sam Lee has followed an ‘Old Wow’ with a ‘New Wow’.
