Stark, menacing, visceral also hauntingly beautiful, the Glasgow singer-songwriter’s fourth LP reprises her creative partnership with fellow Scottish artist Lomond Campbell first explored on 2022’s For You Who Are The Wronged, with striking experimental soundscapes coloured by electronica as well as her piano and other instruments. Instantly of course it’s always Joseph’s voice that hits the listener – jittery, fragile, breathy, otherworldly, but also disarmingly powerful. Her lyrics are impressionistic, and filled with physicality - fur, bones, blood, animals, death, lust – snapshots of experience and feeling, often raw and violent. On opener WOLF, she delivers the menacing words: “I am wolf and you’re full of blood … You are safe only when I’m gone.” On DARK: “In this dark, the light is altered / Turn your back to its pull / This bone it will fracture / All you have and all you know.” Or over the stunning, dark beats and electronica of HARBOUR: We of the earth will fill up your mouth / Watch as she swallows what you were worth/ Well, not it be of the signs they said / Here lies the light keeper she is dead … You, you, you … You harbour, or have broken bone/ And all my armour, it is swollen and thrown / A way to keep me from moving, I know.” DEER is another standout, quieter, simmering, minimal but resonant, while ROADKILL begins with a simple four-chord structure, gradually building into thunderous drums and swelling chorus as these strikingly visceral, whispered lyrics unfold: “Light a fire / Make a bed funeral pyre / You can call me roadkill / I am fucked here / By want and desire/ Just to have my mouth filled / All I am now is waiting to die / And I’ll make it easy …” And on the last track, FIRE, awash with keyboards, she revisits the recurring wolf theme with a a gentle defiance in the face of what we assume is climate meltdown: “The world is on fire / And I hope, that we will survive / All the sore of all the let go of loves of our lives/ But I am a wolf now, so I have to try.” Chillingly stark, sinewy but also survivor-instinct strong. Out on Rock Action Records.
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