Eight years after the release of her debut, Raise a Storm, Lindsey Black takes to the skies for her aerial second album, Flight. Bolstering her sound with rich, golden guitars and lavish, molten piano, the Edinburgh musician crafts a glittering and evocative record.
Partly recorded in Dunbar with collaborators Ady Powers and Alex Cornish, Flight was inspired by the beauty of the East Lothian coastline.
But don’t let that fool you; there is very little traditionally Scottish about this album. Black instead draws from a palette of blues-rock and Americana, with her California-based cousin David Dutton and friend John Kraus providing the record’s sun-soaked guitars and drums. There is undeniably, though, something of Scotland’s windswept shores in the cymbals showering over the album’s moody opener ‘Down On Your Luck’ and in the restless, rippling piano of ‘A Long Time’.
But while producer Graeme Young’s deep, rustic textures anchor the music to the land and the sea, Black’s vocals are ghostly and ethereal, opening the soundscape up to the heavens. Bringing to mind both the siren call of Weyes Blood and the smoky, bluesy sincerity of Margo Price, Black’s voice glides weightless and unfettered over the lumbering riff of ‘Undone’ and the fizzing synth-pop of ‘Truth’ alike.
A sense of open space and bracing, fresh air pervades the album’s ten tracks. While all concise in length, each song seems to contain its own vast environment, as if suggesting the potential for unexplored territory, unclaimed freedom. As Black asks us on the final track, ‘are we holding back all we can be?’
Flight is out now
