Echo Bloom
Album: Blue
Label: Songs & Whispers
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.echobloom.com

Released Stateside two years back and now available across Europe, this is the first in Brooklyn-based frontman Kyle Evans' three colours trilogy, each cast in a different musical genre. Next year's Red will draw on country-rock, followed by Green's classic pop, but this, written during a stay in Berlin in 2010, and featuring strings, French horn, glockenspiel and autoharp, is what he terms "folk-estral".

The album opens in stunning form with 'Annunciation', a hymnal song about a town's rebirth sung a capella with Aviva Jay and Kat Vargas and choral harmonies backing and entwining with Evans' on a number that shares a stylistic mood with Ben Glover's 'Blackbird'. Introducing banjo and strings, things continue with the waltzing ghost meeting and self-discovery of 'Cedar Beach', conjuring thoughts of Simon & Garfunkel. Featuring a flourish of cosmic strings, the nature-themed 'Veins', is the first to really spotlight Evans' default vocal style, a sort of cracked tenor whisper that mirrors the album's intimate feel, then comes the title number, initial simple acoustic guitar and banjo giving way to closing cello, Evans slipping into falsetto as he wistfully reflects on the way life can slip past as you settle into your ways.

A rework from a previous album, 'The Prostitute (Goodbye Savannah)' is one of the major highlights, Jaye harmonising on an aching meditation on loss and encroaching mortality ("First his eyes were a dimmer blue….and I'm scared 'cause the thing that's new is I notice I'm fading too"). The musical mood picks up slightly with the near eight-minute banjo driven 'The Flood', though the lyrics, a contemporary update of Noah building the ark ("every afternoon I waited for the rain"), remain firmly downcast, and then, after evoking one biblical allusion, along comes its aftermath, 'The Returning Of The Doves' a bluesy folk tune duet that suggests an Appalachian Nick Drake, at least until the drums and a ferocious electric guitar kick in.

The album plays out on two contrastive numbers. Organ drone introduces 'Fireworks', a romantic guitar and piano waltzer in which the subject of the title serves as a cosmic metaphor for life, "so beautiful, and yet so brief", lighting the blue touch paper to an orchestral playout, while 'Seeds' takes it down to the bone with just strummed guitar backdropping the twin vocals for a reunion and farewell as, lives complete, the lovers return to the earth from whence they came. Let Echo Bloom bring some colour to your life.

Mike Davies