Helen Svoboda – Headwater

Helen Svoboda's latest is in the lost tradition of album as journey. Announcing itself like glaring daybreak, it pulls you down into the depths of its own nocturnal dreamworld, one of dusky beauty and clammy tension. This shift is skilfully done, the album’s opening third slowly shifting from the gently off-centre but relatively linear If and Child into something more sunken and strange, the album's final stretch forming an almost uncomfortably raw three-part howl of dissonance.

Svoboda has created an interesting sound world, one of spartanly recorded bowed double bass pushed into the panicky clamour of nightmares, as on Solo, or soothing, as it is on the swooning Chords. That said, as the album commits further to its feeling of dwelling in discordant miasma the more missteps it takes. The vocal-centric work, while technically dexterous, feels lacking, rarely achieving the highs found elsewhere; on Ymni, two aimlessly yammering vocal lines coalesce offering a feeling of being privy to some subconscious breakthrough, but moments like this are hard to come by for stretches of the album. And so you’re left with a record that feels patchy, one that, while often entrancing, can’t quite coral everything it wants into its singular vision.

Listen to: Evening Hepuli, Chords, If