Album Review: Anna Mieke, Theatre

On opener ‘Twin’, Anna Mieke brilliantly describes pictures through a child’s eye: “Train tracks screaming in the dead of night/ Trees evergreen blinking in the car light”. 

The psychedelic whimsy of ‘For a A Time’, meanwhile, is reminiscent of early Pink Floyd – an English summer garden majestically conjured across an ascending guitar riff and magical cut-ups, as she sings of “Rosettes on the door frame twenty years of hanging / Jaws of gold teeth in the light they are glinting”. 

Kudos to Black Mountain Recording – located on the Cooley Peninsula in Co. Louth, it’s a bastion of the flourishing Irish alt-folk scene. Prduced by Nick Rayner, this is a beautiful record. The percussion – from the bodhrán ending on ‘For A Time’ to the shimmering breakdown on ‘Coralline’ – is sublime. Equally, swathes of harmonium, fiddle, clarinet and saxophone are peppered throughout. The harp on ‘Red Sun’ is exquisite.   

You sense from Theatre that Mieke has seen the world, and then some. ‘Seraphim’ – channelling Pakistani qawwali, Malian kora, Brazilian samba and Senegalese Wolof – suggests she was paying more than a little attention. Elsewhere, she makes John Jacob Nile’s Appalachian folk classic ‘Go Away From My Window’ her own – some feat when Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt are among the masters who have recorded it. A fine album.

Listen: ‘Seraphim’
Score: 9/10

Out now via (nettwerk).

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