Album Review: Ali Comerford, Knots

Ali Comerford has spent 14 years playing the viola in classical ensembles all over the world. She’s played the Royal Albert Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the National Concert Hall. But 2020 saw the Kilkenny native coming home to Ireland, with her first long stretch of free-time since she began her career in classical music.

She focused on making original music, writing, producing, and performing every note on Knots. Along the way, she had to deal with considerable anxiety (a theme mined on the album’s title track), overanalysing her own work, and moving abroad and back again. Three iterations of a song called ‘America’ track her feelings about leaving things behind and returning home, in plainspoken lyrics.

Still, it’s clear Comerford hasn’t abandoned her strings altogether, and the moments in which they creep onto Knots are some of the more beautiful on the album. In the flighty ‘Come Home’, they provide an arresting tension to Comerford’s feather-light voice. On ‘Warned’, they signal ominous foreboding.

Other highlights include the breathtaking ‘Birds-Eye View’ and album closer ‘Mess’, a quiet piano tune that wonderfully bookends a beautifully orchestrated debut.