Ten years may be a long time to wait between debut and follow up, but the launch of the album Safe Passage earlier this month as the second release by space-folk duo, Astralingua, is a collection of thoughtfully crafted songs. Comprising vocalist Anne Rose Thompson and composer/vocalist Joseph Andrew Thompson, their first EP, Contact, came out in 2008; one reason it has taken them so long to release Safe Passage is because parts of it have been recorded in the Mojave Desert, others in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The duo, based in Denver, Colorado, are joined on this album by various musicians to provide string, woodwind and mandolin accompaniment and the overall effect is entrancing. Joseph Thompson has described their style as "spacey" - in the colloquial sense, but also referring to both the sensation of open space that they hope to inspire with their tracks, as well as the musical sense of slower tempos and long echoes. This creates a series of frequently haunting, always beautiful songs, which first came to my attention because of the their first single from the album, an adaptation of William Blake's "A Poison Tree".
The first track on the album, "Plunge", is the most upbeat of the songs included here, a beautiful start to the album with Joseph and Anne accompanied by a string octet with sections that echo The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby". It is a particularly rousing start to Safe Passage and is intended as a more stirring introduction to the tracks that follow. The tone changes immediately with the following track, "Visitor", a more minimalist and much slower piece that begins with solo guitar and delicate vocal harmonies before other instruments slowly join in. The lyrics, including the haunting opening line, "Come with me my weary child, cold and all alone", draw on various poetic references such as W. B. Yeats's "The Stolen Child" and Geothe's "Erlkönig"; the whole song is ambiguous as to whether the child has ascended into heaven or has died, and this melancholy theme continues throughout the rest of the album.
"Sweet Dreams" continues the pensive reflections introduced by "Visitor", with the subtle Travis-style guitar accompanied by mournful guitar and, as with every track on Safe Passage, the harmony of Joseph and Anne Thompson's voice is frequently breathtaking. "The Nimble Men", the shortest piece on the album, is presented as a chaos of sound that breaks the softer themes of "Sweet Dreams" and "Space Blues", one of my particular favourites: while dealing with the experience of travelling through physical and interior space, it demonstrates the ambition of Astralingua's music, seeking to offer a musical meditation on awareness and experience. "Phantoms", while also following the slow tempo of the majority of the album, strikes a very different, more forceful tone as the confident, minimalist piano solo is interrupted by mournful cello and then disturbed, cackling voices; with "NSA" - a reference to "No Strings Attached" - these three pieces can be seen as representing the pivot of the album, a meditation on loneliness that lead us to the single that was the initial inspiration for this review.
"A Poison Tree", which was released at the end of 2018, is a superb interpretation of Blake's Song of Experience. The simplicity of the guitar, mandolin and violin accompaniment create a sound that has - fittingly for this space folk duo - been described as celestial. It is an extremely original interpretation, with Joseph Thompson having said in interviews that he has wished to bring out the playfulness of Blake's poetry. I would remark that this would seem a very unusual interpretation for such a poem that is usually seen as a darker meditation on themes of revenge, but - in a very different style - it can be seen also as a motivating factor in one other adaptation, the Britpop bounce of Blur's Magpie, which was the B-side to Blur's 1994 single, "Girls and Boys". For me, when listening to the song it demonstrates more a sense of wistfulness, perhaps, that anger should lead to destruction: certainly it ranks as one of the very best popular interpretations of Blake's poem.
The adaptation of Blake is followed by three very different tracks that are, however, linked by a slower tempo. "The Fallen" is, like "NSA" and "Space Blues", one of the longer and more ambitious tracks on the album. It also includes a number of literary and folk references, such as to "The Unfortunate Rake" and "The Cowboy's Lament" (which later influenced the Scottish song, "Willie McBride") as well as echoes of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" in the final word, "Nevermore". "Passage to Albion", which follows, is one of the most beautiful pieces on an album that brims with a range of sweet harmonies, while the final track on Safe Passage, "The Troubled Road", is a much longer and somewhat darker piece: a narrative song, it follows the singer as he travels along the road that leads to the Styx, this lost Orpheus apparently unaware that he has died and is now entering Hades.
The space folk sound that Astralingua evoke on Safe Passage is entirely their own, but has echoes for me of other artists who sometimes fall into this category, particularly those who explore the more melancholy aspects of the genre, such as Fever Ray in "If I Had a Heart", Grimm Grimm's "Hazy Eyes Maybe" and the superb "Dead Queen" by Espers. You can listen to the album via streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, or order the album from Astralingua's Bandcamp page. It is delicate, melancholy and, with its tribute to Blake's "A Poison Tree", a completely original setting of one of the Romantic artist's most famous poems.
Safe Passage, released March 8, 2019, and available as CD and digital download from astralingua.bandcamp.com.