Seabuckthorn - The Silence Woke Me artwork

Seabuckthorn: The Silence Woke Me (Bookmaker Records)

It’s taken a while to assemble a review of this, Seabuckthorn’s second album through Bookmaker Records, released during 2012. That’s not because of a lack of interest, or a reluctance to share its brilliance with the world at large; it’s more that The Silence Woke Me is so atmospheric, so mercurial and mystical, so rich in obfuscated complexity, that it tends to generate altered states that don’t then lend themselves to the mundane process of turning reactions into words in sentences.

Continuing with the previous album In Nightfall‘s take on genres known variously as freak folk or alt-folk, Seabuckthorn mutates the technical skill of old school fingerpickers like John Fahey and Robbie Basho in the same way that modern musicians like Matt ‘MV’ Valentine and Ben Chasny have successfully done. Psychedelic without being outwardly ‘weird’, and combining mellow sounds with a sense of creeping isolation and paranoia, the ten tracks here form a coherent journey of an album: the track titles include words like ‘swept’, ‘pull’, ‘fleeting’ and ‘ebb’, reflecting a sense of shifting restlessness that pervades the whole piece, as if Andy Cartwright (aka Seabuckthorn) is collating a stream of consciousness that never reaches simplistic resolution.

Through cavalcades of fingerpicked guitar arpeggios and melodies, a feeling of chaos is pulled into shape with eerie, sweeping echos and (electronic?) sounds that ultimately provide a comforting sense of rhythm and structure. Repeated motifs become apparent both within songs and the album as a whole, and the soundscapes created by Cartwright form themselves into interwoven strata that come together in ways within which it’s difficult not to get lost.

At its core, The Silence Woke Me, and indeed Seabuckthorn’s output in general, is a simple proposition. Pleasing twelve-string guitar lines and a clear understanding of the emotional effect of subtle key and tone changes, along with performances that demonstrate great skill and knowledge, might normally be perfectly good enough. Nice songs, nicely played. There’s a sense of magic apparent in this album, however, that it’s impossible to locate or define: these songs exist on a higher plane, and it feels as if they’ve always done so.

Listen to the record and order at Bookmaker Records. Seabuckthorn on MySpace