The Grand Gestures – The Grand Gestures

There’s No Place Like Home: both a song title and a maxim for Jan Burnett’s new project The Grand Gestures. The Spare Snare founder invited six collaborators round to his to drape their vocals across lo-fi instrumentals, and the results are as diverse as his guest-list. On spooky opener Deer in a Cross Hair, Sparrow and the Workshop’s Jill O’Sullivan flits between spoken-word verses and a sung chorus, but any assumptions as to the album’s presiding lyrical tone are immediately challenged by Sanjeev Kholi’s witty rumination I Wonder What Chris De Burgh Is Doing Right Now, which forces a left-turn into a more flippant register.

Evocative musical foundations from Burnett stop these oil-and-water bedfellows from immiscibly clashing, the domestic Svengali fostering a degree of consistency that carries through contributions from Emma Pollock (the brooding A Certain Compulsion) and Calamateur (the drifting Baiting). Appealingly imperfect, this is a curio worth exploring.