Caroline Weeks - Songs for Edna

Folk music is not enjoying a renaissance within pop - rather, the two have had a long-established relationship that has simply been developing in the spotlight recently. An offshoot of recent folk-pop stylings is an otherworldly baroque sound, and a fine exponent of this is Caroline Weeks, sometime collaborator with the ethereal Bat For Lashes. Songs for Edna is a sparse, yet sprawling record, taking works of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay and vocalising the words with soft singing and gently picked guitar. While Weeks is doubtless capable of greater variation, this possesses a purposefully restrained air, the music given little space to breathe or expand. Fleeting sense of the lyrical is apparent, and one suspects that her use of poetry is a creative device rather than a tribute, as phrases slip by, unintelligible beneath that thin cooing voice. A project of indulgence that may try before it rewards.