Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/10/05
Label: Fat Cat

The critical reappraisal and subsequent reemergence of lost folk wonder Vashti Bunyan is as remarkable a tale as popular music has to offer in 2005. Admittedly, it's a story aided by the fantastic mis-en-scene that seems to surround this intriguingly named folk apparition like fairy dust. Surely anyone who, after watching their brilliant debut fall on deaf ears, chooses to travel in a horse-drawn caravan to the Isle of Skye in search of a new life on Donovan's commune, deserves our attention second time around.

Appropriately, it took a bunch of one-time record store clerks turned musicians to pluck Bunyan from obscurity, and give her story a conclusion befitting its obscure legacy. New York's Animal Collective released the mercilessly brief "Prospect Hummer EP" early in the year and, had Bunyan decided at that point that it was time to jump on a camel and lead a caravan into the desert never to return, her legend would have been secure.

As it is, her creative rebirth continues apace and finally we have a full-length successor to her overlooked debut, 1970's "Diamond Day". The association with Animal Collective yielded a creative partnership with Fat Cat labelmate, Max Richter, who assembled a dream team of contemporary folksters for the album. Joanna Newsom, Adem and Devendra Banhart all contribute. Over 30 years since she last recorded, it's remarkable that Vashti Bunyan's music is still so expressive of the wonder buried in the everyday. Everything she touches is shot through with a 7am glow, a transfixing surface that can be hard to penetrate.

Consequently, the record's treasure is folded into layers which make it an endlessly rewarding place to invest a couple of months of your life. Striped back to acoustic folk textures, her voice is amplified so that the tremble of breath is evident. Listening to deeply personal and quietly philosophical tales like "Wayward" or "Feet Of Clay" can feel like intruding on a moment of intimacy.

In over 30 years of relentless development and change, a time in which the music industry has become as much a part of the mechanised production process as other less precariously sensitive industries, "Lookaftering" is a dispatch from another time. It was delivered by a messenger from the past.

    by James Poletti