Leave To Remain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article documents a current album. Information is likely to change as the album remains on the charts. |
| Leave To Reamin | ||
| Image:Kathryn Williams - Leave To Reamin (2006).jpg | ||
| Studio album by Kathryn Williams | ||
| Released | October 1, 2006 | |
| Recorded | July 2006 [1] | |
| Genre | Folk | |
| Length | 52:19 (Europe/Australia) | |
| Label | Caw Records | |
| Professional reviews | ||
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| Kathryn Williams chronology | ||
| Over Fly Over (2003) |
Leave To Remain (2006) |
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Kathryn Williams is a singer-songwriter whose work is characterised by delicate vocals and acoustic instruments. She has been compared in style to such artists as Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro and Joan Baez and is a former Mercury Music Prize nominee, and a Gold-Record artist.
Leave To Remain is the sixth studio album by Kathryn Williams released by Caw Records on October 1, 2006 in the United Kingdom.
[edit] Production and title
Article by: Stuart Heritage - [4] hecklerspray.com - CD Review
Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is an album that drips with restrained autumnal beauty, from the songwriting to the production to the crystal whisper of Kathryn Williams herself. We're loopy about Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams, can you tell?
Common consensus is that Kathryn Williams doesn't like her music to be called folk, but it's a tag she's going to have to make do with until someone finds a better way to describe the gorgeous music on Leave To Remain. Musically, Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is most closely related to Rejoicing In The Hands/Nino Rojo-era Devendra Banhart, and he's kind of folky, isn't he? In fact, the relationship between Kathryn Williams and Devendra Banhart doesn't just end there - even the artwork for Leave To Remain manages to out-Banhart Banhart. Leave To Remain, though, is an album which deserves to be judged entirely on its own merits, so let's do that.
Leave To Remain is just as striking for its space as it is for any noise you'll hear on it - the whole album is as spare and lovely as you'd hope, with Kathryn Williams leaving the listener hanging on every last word and note from start to finish. Guitars chime, pianos tinkle and the occasional trumpet or viola will crop up here and there to support Kathryn Williams' voice, which remains as crystalline and still as a creek hidden in a forest. Leave To Remain by Kathryn Williams is a beautiful, delicate record that never loses its sense of humanity.
Unsurprisingly for a woman who is happy to discuss babies coming out of her arse in interviews, Kathryn Williams' lyrics on Leave To Remain are endearingly batty. On Leave To Remain opener Blue Onto You, Kathryn is quick to gently assert that "Blue doesn't really exist." Before you can work out whether she's talking about defunct boyband Blue or the actual colour blue (which does exist - hecklerspray is sitting on a blue chair at a blue desk with a blue stapler on it and a blue ethernet cable coming out of our laptop in a room with a blue carpet. We can take a picture to prove it, Kathryn), Kathryn Williams' voice has burst into harmonies shooting off into a million different directions that hit you in the gut like a battering ram. It's a moment to cherish, but it isn't the only highpoint on Leave To Remain by any means.
While songs like Sandy L and Stevie sketch out snatches of incidents and personalities, always leaving enough room for your imagination to fill in the blanks, the one outstanding track on Leave To Remain is Glass Bottom Boat, a song that sounds like one of Aphex Twin's dips into ambient piano work from his Drukqs album. It's so ornate that it hardly sounds real, until Williams sneaks in her lyrics, about a man who sees "everything I hide but still keeps me afloat." Glass Bottom Boat also benefits from its imagery; at one point Kathryn Williams sings "we're as tired as rock pools" - a line as perfect as you're ever likely to hear.
Coming directly after Glass Bottom Boat on Leave To Remain, recent Kathryn Williams single Hollow sounds almost vulgar with all of its lush instrumentation. It's not, of course, it's a slice of country-brushed folk that tugs at the heartstrings just as much as any of the other songs on this dazzling album.
[edit] External links
==Track listing==
