Following our previous entry featuring King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, let's turn to another Scottish artist, and fly from bats to birds into an otherworldly sound by the Inverness singer-songwriter. This is the opening track from her debut album, Bones You Have Thrown Me And Blood I've Spilled, but the whole work is very much of this ilk, and won the Scottish Album of the Year Award in 2015.
Recorded with Glasgow producer Marcus Mackay, who worked on Frightened Rabbit’s Sing the Greys, Joseph's work is both starkly simple and yet immensely complex and intimate in the private world in which it immerses us. The Bird is a metaphor for the difficult of relationship with family and loved ones, being at once close and yet not knowing each other at all. But what is most striking of all, along her mesmeric, pedal-echoey piano playing, is the voice – ghostly, fragile and marked with an oddly expressive, brittle vibrato. It sounds studio-affected, but is in fact just how she sings, as the live video below also shows. She may remind of Joanna Newsom, Kate Bush or Tori Amos, but Joseph is a uniquely remarkable and unusual artist who has also not found success until hitting her forties, she has begun to release new material this too.
You do not know me,
And never will,
Bones you have thrown me
And blood I've spilled.
It will be better,
I do not know
You bring me dead birds
And then you go.
You and – don't want me
Make me – and might –
Oats you have sown me
At needle point.
It will be better
I do not know
you bring me dead birds
And then you go.
And it sounds like all our lives
And it sounds like all our lives
And it sounds like all our lives
And it sounds like –
You do not know me,
And never will,
Bones you have thrown me
And blood I've spilled.
It will be better,
I do not know
You bring me dead birds
And then you go.
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