In The Gardens Of The North

Clearly benefiting from being on a label with a decent budget for a change, British lo-fi champion Markland Starkie’s third record under the Sleeping States moniker is his best yet. His songs have a deliciously dark tone despite sounding like he came from the era of Cat Stevens and Donovan. Cellos stab with menace and drums tick like clocks, all scoring his stories about man’s relationship with nature. It’d be a shame to see Sleeping States written off as yet another yorkaday singer-songwriter. He pushes the conventions of the modern folk song as far as he can (‘Showers In The Sumer,’ ‘The Cartographer’), giving us a genre of music that is completely his own.