AMERICANA
BY SYLVIE SIMMONS
Lucy Kitchen
★★★★
In The Low Light
BOHEMIAN ROSE/MAKE MY DAY. CD/DL/LP
UK folk-Americana artist’s evocative third album.
Singer-songwriter Kitchen’s first album since Sun To My Moon (2017) is a song cycle of sorts. A story of love, loss, grief and magical thinking told in 11 new songs, most of them slow to mid-tempo, all of them beautiful. It’s an album to listen to all the way through, starting with monochrome opener Winter King and ending with the sunset in closer September’s Come. At various times Kitchen’s voice and acoustic guitar are augmented by piano, banjo, mellotron, bass, brass, electric guitar, drums woodwind and/or steel, adding muted colours, while doing nothing to break the somewhat dreamlike, haunted mood. Kitchen wrote these songs after the death of her husband. But it’s not a gloomy album. The pedal steel sounds almost jaunty on Red Skies – whose melody brings a young, folky Kristofferson to mind – while on Chemo Song an electric guitar sparkles and rings.