- There’s something very well-measured about Lucy Roleff. Listening to her music, everything appears to be in its place. I think it might stem from her work as a painter and illustrator. Her second full-length, Left Open In A Room seems almost like a picture exhibition: each finely plucked folk-tune with its elements arranged like a still life.
Roleff’s deeper voice and wistfully restrained songwriting recalls Nico with some Joni Mitchell highlights or even Aldous Harding (especially her older, folkier stuff). I think there’s a similar sense of control at play in Harding and Roleff, though Harding uses hers to produce awkwardness and (hilarious) emotional terrorism. Roleff, by contrast, is more serene, she works like she’s curating a zen garden and she’d never dream of turning it upside-down, raked stones flying in all directions.
Not to draw out the metaphor too much, but the simplicity of the opener, Waiting For My Friend, just the barest gesture of the beginning of a romance, is like a haiku “and I think he likes / to look in my eyes / fluttering / to my surprise.” As the emotions become more complex, on recent single A Woman’s Worth, which leaps over love and looks at it from the other end, as it’s failing, there’s still a distance “dreams fulfilled / but the edges worn with / drawn out grievances / long nights / and the sullen dinners.” It’s considered, analysed and less raw than you might expect in the world of alternative music; but instead you get something poised, all-encompassing.
Not to be snobby, but it may be that the largest number of people can’t really cope with music like this, these days. Artists like Obscura Hail, or Pascal Babare have a lot in common with Roleff: they make drily beautiful music that may not be the right fit for the pub. Perhaps they’d be better suited to a drawing room awash with natural light. That may be right, because I’m not sure drawing rooms actually exist anymore. Speaking of Pascal Babare, his 2018 album Endless Room was one of the finer records of that year and certainly one of the more underappreciated. Be that as it may he brings his talents here, too, as collaborator, producer and a general inspiration.
When I first heard Left Open In A Room I would have said a lot of the right people were involved. It takes the orchestration that Roleff first experimented with on her 2016 LP This Paradise and astutely complements the sparseness of her one guitar, one whispering woman approach. In actual fact nearly all of the credit goes to Roleff and Babare who’ve been beetling away on all sorts of instruments, though they’ve carefully avoided ever overwhelming the original, simple effectiveness of the sound. Oh and a nod must go to Nick Huggins who brings his usual understated genius to the mastering.
Given the way folk music is these days and how most people -still, secretly- feel about a band like Mumford & Sons, I have to admit that I don’t know who wants to listen the perfectly measured sounds of Lucy Roleff. Except for me, that is. Perhaps you do too. It’s possible you may even have a drawing room available for that purpose. You may wish to repair to there sometime soon and do just that.
- Chris Cobcroft.