Record Collector

A master in fine arteries

After a 35-year gap between her beloved debut album and its follow-up, Lookaftering, Vashti Bunyan’s third – and supposedly final – long-player, Heartleaps, might have surprised fans with its comparatively speedy gestation time of nine years. If this is to be Bunyan’s final word, it’s a fitting one. This is the distilled, finely crafted essence of Bunyan: a hushed, reflective meditation of an album that seems to have the welcome effect of cancelling out the world around the listener. While Lookaftering saw Bunyan crowned by an adoring generation of musicians, including collaborations with Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart and Max Richter, here Bunyan largely works alone, resulting in her sparsest record yet. The chief focus is on her impeccably preserved voice, gentle and crystalline throughout; on the likes of Jellyfish, she harmonises and overlaps with herself to mesmerising effect. Any listener that manages to get through the closing title track without feeling their bottom lip tremble is made of stronger stuff than this reviewer. Over minimal backing, Bunyan almost whispers a series of words – “Heartleap, headlong, heartache… headache” – culminating in an awed repetition of the album’s title. It’s heart-swelling, unspeakably beautiful stuff and a suitable end to a strange and wonderful career.

4 star
Fat Cat

Jamie Atkins - Record Collector

HU Now

ALBUM REVIEW: VASHTI BUNYAN – HEARTLEAP

British singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan will be releasing her new album, Heartleap, on 6th October 2014 through FatCat Records. Heartleap is the artist’s third studio album, following Lookaftering in 2005. Before this, Vashti had been on a 35 year hiatus following the release of her début album Just Another Diamond Day, which was first released in 1970. Bunyan had left music shortly after the album sold very few copies, and ironically gained cult status amongst her following, leading to a re-release in 2000.

Having had 9 years to write material after her previous album, we can only hope that Heartleap lives up to expectation. The opening track on Heartleap is Across The Water. This track is typically a Vashti Bunyan song, with a dreamy edge and an almost lullaby-like melody. It opens the album with a recognisable, comforting sound, which will be welcomed and reassuring to the Bunyanites out there. It’s always tentative releasing music, and being unsure whether or not the original fan base is still there, and if they still want to hear the same sort of music they were hearing in the 1970′s.

One of the more notable tracks on the album is Mother. Introducing itself with a slow piano, the song goes on to feature a violin accompaniment which almost gives it a festive atmosphere. The song conjures up feelings of a cold, grey winters day. The lyrics on this track are undeniably heartfelt and personal, giving it an extra ‘je ne sais quois’, perhaps authenticity, which is a major aspect of all the tracks on this album.

Shell, like many Vashti Bunyan songs, features interesting instrumentation layers and compositions, including a piano bordering on a harpsichord. This adds a sense of originality to Bunyan’s music, a pleasing prospect after all the years away from music. Possibly this could be Vashti’s way of bringing the zeitgeist of 1970′s folk back into the fold.

Blue Shed is a track on the album, most distinct because of its lyrics. Time and time again Bunyan offers honest lines and this track is no exception. Blue Shed is very story-led and some listeners will find they can relate to some of the key lyrics, an important factor for an artist hoping to stay current. The album closes with the eponymous track Heartleap. It is definitely one of the stronger tracks on the album. It has an interesting melody, as to be expected it has interesting lyrics and again features an almost lullaby like piano accompaniment, making it a perfect ‘wind-down’ for the end of the album.

vashti doorstep flowers

For the first time Bunyan has had complete control over the album making process and so recorded and edited much of it alone at her home studio in Edinburgh. For a mostly solo effort, the production is fantastic. Bunyan has expressed that the process would have been easier with an engineer and a producer, but she’s also said recording it alone meant she could make it into the record she wanted to make, rather than it be changed as part of a collaborative effort. Without any deadlines to meet, Bunyan has been able to take time over record’s creation.

Overall, the album is interesting, relaxing and features some great vocal performances from Bunyan. One slightly downside to the record is that due to the similar pace and sounds of many of the songs, some fade into one another and it can be hard to hear notable differences between them. For existing Bunyan fans, this won’t be a problem and they’ll be pleased with her new effort. As well as many of the songs sounding similar, sometimes it can be hard to work out where the verses change to choruses, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. The record is extremely intricate and the flow of the different parts means it adds to the overall flow of the record merging into one piece of music.

Ros Boyes - HU Now

Incendiary Magazine

VASHTI BUNYAN – HEARTLEAP

Vashti Bunyan LP beautiful? You don’t say. This really is some record mind, and all the more good and fab for just building on the pattern set by 2005’s Lookaftering. From the opening track this record has that fabulous ‘Bunyanesque’ trick of calming everything down and imposing a new sense of time on proceedings. In this she really is a match for Nick Drake; creating the sense that we’re describing a mental landscape, or a worldview that has its roots in another time; one that can be traced to before The Fall.

In some ways Bunyan’s stories are both supremely relevant and irrelevant; like the greatest art able to be totally misinterpreted, mutated or revered. Whatever Heartleap’s really about is another red herring. I would guess it’s about things that are incredibly important and over in blink of an eye; and in that, the ‘importance’ that ultimately underpins this record can be safely left aside. So you can pay attention and examine the miniscule joins and progressions in these songs or you can allow the whole thing to flow around you like some beautiful mist. Here, and Mother are beautiful cases in point; the songs’ tales being slowly drawn out, like threads being slowly unraveled and examined in miniscule detail; but still able to throw out a massive comfort blanket which the listener can lose themselves in. And the last track Heartleap seems to sum the whole record up with its winsome turns of phrase and beautiful descending melody, which in turn is gently bourn aloft by some beautiful, gentle guitar picking and quiet piano phrases.

So it’s a beautiful record. The ending coda of Jellyfish is ridiculously attractive as is the lattice-like melody that encases Shell. But saying Vashti Bunyan records are beautiful is beside the point really; it’s like saying wellies keep your feet dry in a muddy field. It’s not the pinpoint accuracy of the melodies, the way they patiently pick a path through explaining a set of wider truths. It’s not the way that this record seems (on repeated listen) to be a pre-ordained message from another planet or time. It’s not Bunyan’s breathy, soothing delivery (which somehow has opened up into a more powerful and assured, more resonant voice here, or am I hearing things?) It’s not the way the melody line picks you up and bears you off; everything Bunyan has ever done has this knack. It’s about the fact that Bunyan can tap into something else that is nigh on indescribable and inside all of us. Explaining this sort of stuff is supremely difficult to write about, unless you are going to splurge your emotions over the page in a show of sympathetic feeling. Bunyan’s new record is the radiant acclamation of the simple, overwhelming brilliance of being alive.

Vashti Bunyan, should be on national curriculums or piped into houses across the lands. Cameron, Jonker, Putin, Obama, you fucktards. Sort it.

Richard Foster - Incendiary Magazine

Penny Black

Vashti Bunyan: Heartleap

Vashti Bunyan’s back story has been told so many times it hardly needs repeating here. I’d rather direct newcomers to her music to a book by Jeanette Leech titled ‘Seasons They Change’ but briefly Vashti’s debut album, ‘Another Diamond Day’, was released in the latter part of 1970 and was almost totally ignored. The few who did hear it at the time thought it was a just another collection of, admittedly good, folk songs, but the album didn’t attract any real attention despite some major names (Joe Boyd, Robin Williamson, Dave Swarbrick, Simon Nicol, Mike Crowther) being involved. So, Vashti dropped out of the music business, and it wasn’t until the album was reissued in 2000 that people really started taking notice.

With a new generation finally realising that there was so much more to Vashti’s music than the folk tag it had been given, the singer/songwriter, whose debut single in 1965 was a Jagger/Richards song produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, eventually cut her second album in 2005, the gorgeous ‘Lookaftering’. Given those early Stones connections and her folk leanings, it’s no surprise that back in the mid-sixties Vashti was compared to Marianne Faithfull but, as Faithfull’s vocals on her later work shed the innocence that attracted so many to her in the first place and was replaced by a voice that reflected her lifestyle, Vashti’s vocals on ‘Lookaftering’ were even more delicate than those she exposed on ‘Just Another Diamond Day’. The magic was still there in Vashti’s fragile vocal delivery and it was even more affecting.

What was also surprising about ‘Lookaftering’ was that Vashti’s songs, although now championed by a new wave of folk artists, were even further removed from what is usually regarded as ‘folk music’. The pop element that fashioned Vashti’s early work was even more pronounced but it was also embellished with a contemporary sheen, and a kind of otherworldliness floated throughout the album. Vashti had taken inspiration from the music she had always heard in her head and developed her own unique sound. It was an astonishing and totally unexpected return.

And now after another nine years Vashti releases her third album, ‘Heartleap’, although there was a collection of her early singles and demos issued in 2007 that is fascinating to say the least. Vashti’s timing couldn’t be better. With recent new albums by fellow 60's cult icons Bonnie Dobson and Linda Pheracs, the focus is more than ever on folk-inspired female singer/songwriters who were ignored at the time but who have built up a considerable following through the years. Then there’s Kate Bush and her first shows in 35 years receiving glowing reviews. While Bush never really embraced folk music like Vashti, there are parallels in the artists’ work. Both have a Donovan connection somewhere along the line, both have pushed boundaries in music (and continue to do so) and both are, decades after their initial forays into music, still making music that fascinates. And, of course, both artists have such distinctive voices. Vashti’s upcoming handful of October gigs will be far from the theatrical extravaganza that Bush is involved in, but you can be assured the end result will be the same for the audience.

The ten songs on ‘Heartleap’ are probably the most personal Vashti has ever recorded, and the album includes some of her strongest songs to date. We can only hope that Vashti’s recent statement that ‘Heartleap’ will be her final album doesn’t come true. Although in many ways the album carries on from where ‘Lookaftering’ left off and the two albums, even visually, have a continuing theme, the feeling that Vashti knows that this time people are going to listen seems to have spurred her on to make the most satisfying album of her career.

There are moments when you feel that Vashti’s vocals are so delicate, so fragile, that she isn’t going to make it to the end of the song. It’s fascinating listening to the songs develop and unfold; the instrumentation, which for the main part if I understand it correctly, was created at Vashti’s home in Edinburgh perfectly highlights the singer’s gossamer vocals. The background of real and synthesized music, as subtle as the vocals that float over it, reinforces the fact that although Vashti will forever be classed as a folk singer, there is so much more to her work than just that one genre. It has taken Vashti seven years to put this album together but there’s no indication of that as the songs gently flow into each other. Some of these songs are now seven years old, the latest was written just a few months ago, but yet they sound like they could have been written and recorded within days of each other.

There is a sameness flowing through the songs, but each track does offer up something different; ‘Jellyfish’ is a dream set to music. The opening cut, ‘Across The Water’, does, without the use of sound effects, conjure up images of waves splashing along the shore. It feels like you’re eavesdropping on the obviously personal ‘Mother’, and the closing title song, ‘Heartleap’, is possibly, just possibly, where Vashti lays her innermost feelings out before the listener in a song. Again there’s that otherworldly, dream-like quality to the song which hangs heavily over the whole album.

‘Just Another Diamond Day’ is now heralded as a classic, but the listener can’t help but feel that ‘Heartleap’ is Vashti Bunyan, possibly for the first time, presenting her music the way she wants it to sound without others maybe taking a few diversions along the way. It’s certainly not going to take three decades before ‘Heartleap’ is declared a classic.

‘Heartleap’ isn’t really a set of ten songs; it’s a musical journey that deserves to be listened to from beginning to end in one sitting. Although the soundscapes that Vashti wraps her lyrics in are, at times, sparse, the sound Vashti produces just with guitar and synths, especially on songs such as the title track is truly breathtaking.

‘Heartleap’ is released by Fatcat Records on 6th October 2014 and, thankfully, apart from the CD version, is also available on heavyweight vinyl, Fatcat is also, via their website, offering an attractive bundle which includes a poster of the album artwork. So, no guesses as to where I’m heading right now...

Malcolm Carter - Penny Black

The List

Vashti Bunyan: Heartleap - Hauntingly poetic final album from the singer-songwriter

Vashti Bunyan is a voyeuristic pleasure. She sings like she's murmuring to herself, like you're overhearing her thinking out loud whilst she just happens to be in the same room as the music. ‘I sigh with every breath I’m breathing’, she whispers on ‘Holy Smoke’, and it's this line that sums up Bunyan's style: wistful, private, reflecting. There's something eerily present about her – more than once, this reviewer found themself trying to enter the conversation she's having with herself, as though she were sitting just across the kitchen table.

Her final album, her first in ten years, is 100% pure Bunyan – recorded at home, arranged by herself, Bunyan, who can’t play the piano, also accompanies herself with odd notes and fragments that feel like half-finished thoughts. 'Blue Shed', the traditional artist's lament of wanting a space of pure solitude to create, balanced with the fear that everyone you love will drift away, feels like a scribbled diary entry, a musician's commentary on embarking on such a solitary project.

She unfurls, song by song, with stories of lost love, found love, love that should have been avoided at all costs. ‘Gunpowder’, a stand-out song even in an album of staggeringly good quality, is a poetic confession of a mismatched relationship where all the singer can do is make things worse. ‘It seems that I can never learn my words/Watching them turn around, burning/Lighting the gunpowder trails that you lay’. This is poetry against a backdrop of music – ethereal sounds that lull the listener into a false sense of security whilst she dissects her heart in front of us.

This is her last album, she says. She has finally found that shed – somewhere to ‘keep my words in the air, padlocked there/For ever and silently out of harm’s way’.

Malcolm Carter - The List

4 stars