Reviews

Sailing Stones
Album: Slow Magic
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 12
Website: https://www.thisissailingstones.com/music

Sailing Stones' Slow Magic is an album that feels both intimate and otherworldly, a work that draws listeners into the strange, elastic emotional terrain of matrescence, a new word to me, but now one I fully understand.. Jenny Lindfors, the Irish born, Bristol based artist behind the project, describes motherhood as an experience where time stretches, condenses, fractures, and glows with uncanny intensity. That sense of temporal distortion is everywhere in Slow Magic, an album whose woozy textures, hazy woodwinds, warm guitars, and tape warped electronics create a sonic world that feels suspended between memory and dream. The EPK's imagery songs that "stare at the fire, linger in rainbows, fall in slow motion like comets"is not poetic exaggeration but an accurate description of the album's atmosphere.

Lindfors' lyrical approach is central to this effect. Her writing captures the contradictory emotional states of early motherhood, joy, loneliness, rapture, fear, desire, desperation-without flattening them into a single narrative. The EPK recounts how a simple conversation with a new mother who replied "Lonely" became the seed for Ships, a song coloured blue, exploring how mothers might share profound truths without oversharing. This attention to emotional nuance echoes Fortitude's observation that Lindfors' songs often hinge on "tiny observations," such as a child's overwhelming response to Karen Carpenter or the repetition of early parenthood.

Like many others, I don't have children, yet I have seen the impact of becoming a parent on many of my family and friends. Some have sailed through the experience, more have struggled at the end of a day I am simply able to hand the baby back to it's mother and say see you in the morning. Relationships change almost immediately it's no longer about a person, it's about a role and that is better captured here than on a lot of albums that touch upon the issue. Lindfors has genuinely put herself out there and offered a view that many experience but few openly talk about without capturing in song

The album's creation story deepens its resonance. Lindfors' matrescence coincided with the release of her debut Polymnia in 2020, leaving her exhausted yet compelled to write about her "thin skinnedness," her joy and pain. She found permission in a Quietus interview with Gazelle Twin and Saint Saviour, and further inspiration in Liz Berry's poems, Juliet Miller's writings on maternal creativity, art therapy, and songwriting workshops. These influences surface in the album's psychedelic palette and its refusal to rush. As The Vinyl District notes, Slow Magic unfolds at its own pace, mirroring how profound transformations often happen imperceptibly.

Across twelve colour coded songs, arranged with Dan Moore's haunting touch, Lindfors crafts a record that is both deeply personal and quietly universal. Slow Magic does not attempt to explain matrescence; instead, it invites listeners into its contradictions, offering a communal recognition of an experience long under acknowledged. It is a work of quiet revelations, shimmering beauty, and emotional courage-an album that lingers long after its final, spectral notes fade.

I was lucky enough to be able to read the notes as I heard the album for the first, second and third times and yet "Slow Magic" drew me into places I wasn't expecting to go. One place I have gone to is my shortlist for album of the year.

Angie Ingrams

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