- When an artist like Yeo is excited for a new record you know it’s going to set-up high expectations.. Lee Hannah’s stunning new “visual album” Infinitely opens with a thoughtful, meandering electric bass weaving melody and chords together like it ain’t no thing.. a soft keyboard chords blends in imperceptibly... and already I’m starting to fall into the world Hannah is opening up..
There’s a genuine confidence underpinning this wandering softness. This sounds like a musician who knows what they’re doing, who trusts themselves enough to open a record with a near formless overture that is as captivating as it is sweet. Field recordings from the waterside, creaking boards and an out-of-tune piano take us in to the third cut Salt Lakes as we start to settle into this hypnotic record’s spacious atmosphere. We’re not leading toward a big bang here: this quiet place of aching beauty is where Hannah wants to take us, it is the destination.
The electric bass returns like a enigmatic lead singer on River Won’t Run Forever. It’s a kind of fitting symbol for this album, that an often backgrounded, unassuming instrument is foregrounded, and becomes the main character on a record that keeps leading us out, into the space around, the ambience in the literal sense. This is a record you want to curl up inside of and fall asleep or perhaps sit on the sun-baked earth and watch the birds wheel across the sky as the lake laps at your feet.
Final cut Mallee opens with washes of sustained synth before introducing perhaps the most cohesively narrative (and fittingly, final) moment of the record; there’s a bassline purely to support the piano chords, in addition to the one that’s a melody. There’s a clarinet being melodic, in addition to the bass and there’s the plaintive cries of birds, the almost-shrill mid-frequency buzz of distant insects and the gravelly crunch of footsteps, as Lee Hannah walks slowly out of the frame of this exceptionally accomplished work of audio art.
- Kieran Ruffles.