Beautiful, warm, intimate, gentle, experimental indie-folk by the singer-songwriter Isabella Tweddle from Ripon in North Yorkshire, in this delicious fifth LP, filled with love songs and nostalgic childhood memories, and following 2023’s Drop Cherries, an expansion of excellent musicians in the recording. The title was inspired by Marten's love for "underlining, scribbling in the margins, and folding down the corners of pages in her favourite novels." The artwork is by Brazilian-born painter Daniel Borgonovi, who created the cover only after hearing the album and depicting a portrait of Marten without eyes, which reinforces "the idea of her feeling her way, sharpening her ears and relaxing into the sonic cues." It’s a consistently strong release throughout, from the country inflections of opener Feeling, with memories of Marten falling deep into her father’s large hands, hiding at the top of stairs, and driving toy cars in patterns around her grandmother’s rugs with a lightness of touch: “We are oh so lightly here / Softer than a rabbit ear.” Crown has a perky, intricate rhythm featuring Vishal Nayak and Joshua Crumbly, summons images of watching her cat sat peacefully in the shade, but is “song of longing, of accepting who you are, a truthful interlude”. The slower Clover is full of clever paradoxes: “You’re raining heavy, I’m almost dry / I’m only learning to love you right”, mixing melancholy verses with upbeat chorus. More downbeat but no less beautiful is, No Sudden Changes, a yearning love song uses further animal metaphors - “I am a dog resting on your windowsill”, and “I am the tugging at your sleeve / I am the begging to be seen,” with a distorted organ sound and crumbly, lazy rhythms. The Glass has a warm delicacy of sound, while Leap Year reflects on fleeting love. “Our love is like a rose, it blooms and then it goes / A pocket full of gold, an eyelash on the nose.” Another highlights include the beautifully crisp Planets, and the fabulous closer Swing, with a bigger folk-rock sound, a swing, fiddles, clanging percussion, and fantastical lyrics about trees, being inside the belly of a whale, and “Give me two tickets for the end of the earth / It's sold out, it's sold out.” A wonderful rounded, mature sound, filled with subtle detail and purity of voice, fertile imagination and immaculate musicianship, it’s one of her best to date. Out on Fiction Records.
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