t’s a mood established by the haunting opening title track, a song in which love and loss, the life of a person now “forever underground”, is felt in “the tilt of the planet [the] panorama of the valley”, Jake Falby’s string arrangement and Nadia Hulett’s wordless backing vocals lending the track a rhapsodic weightlessness. That sense of love and grief as a heightened state is continued in Portrait Of A Clear Day, where Byrne confronts loss as something “timeless and wide in the middle of the night… like the world unmade.” A comparison point might be the sensory imagery of William Blake, Byrne singing about how she now sees her surroundings anew, as part of a cruel psychological awakening. As with Blake, there is something rhapsodic in Byrne’s words, a desire to go “further into the moment” as she sings amidst the euphoric kosmische pitter-patter of Summer Glass, the power of her words underlined by the zephyrlike sensuousness of her voice, Littmann’s arpeggiated Prophet Rev, Marilu Donovan’s harp and the empty-room reverb that surrounds them. Yet there is also a dangerous darkness here, one that intrudes on Lightning Comes Up From The Ground and spreads throughout the LP’s final quintet of songs, Byrne’s nylon-string finger-picked guitar and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s shimmering modular synths threaded through imagery of night screams, bloody sheets and terrains of fire. With the final track, the glacially beautiful Death Is The Diamond, Byrne sings of “carrying your death wish back into the arms of this rare life”. It’s an enigmatic statement of valediction that contains the promise of both endurance and cessation, an uncertain but fitting end for an LP that exists simultaneously in both light and darkness.
Posted from: https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/julie-byrne-the-greater-wings-review/
Beside you I drank from the pitcher of life
Whispered as not to wake the land
Timeless and wide in the middle of the night
I want to sing again
How many times I watched the sun rise and die
You know I’ve been alone
Sunlight burns on the water
The blues fall on you like a word unmade
Never to be the same
It was slow but for so long
I watched every gain I thought I’d made
Tumble to the ground