The good news: Joe Chester has followed-up 2005’s acclaimed debut, A Murder Of Crows, with a humdinger of a second album. With his unusually soft and tender delivery and honest, enigmatic lyrics, Chester provides a welcome antidote to all those vacuous singer-songwriters, who for all their emoting don’t really seem to know what the word emotion means. The beautiful vocal accompaniment provided by Gemma Hayes adds enormously to the resonance of The Tiny Pieces Left Behind. I am reminded of John Lennon and Neil Young. It’s that good.
One common quality running through these tracks is their ethereally haunting beginnings and endings. Indeed the songs throughout are impressively constructed and carry the right kind of lyrical weight: check ‘Something Is Better (Than Nothing At All)’, a dark tune illuminated with glimmers of hope; ‘The Right Place’, whose sliding, disturbing, slightly discordant verses are elegantly counterpointed by a sunny shelter-from-the-storm type chorus, and ‘Alarms’, with its strange and unsettling lyrics, so characteristic of Chester’s bleak style.
There are lots of goodies on The Tiny Pieces Left Behind, but the best for me has to be the beautiful ‘Flourescent Light’, which I listened to compulsively 15 times in a row until I’d learnt it by heart. Well done Mr Chester. The Tiny Pieces Left Behind is a great album.

Adrienne Murphy

Key Track: ‘Flourescent Light’