Since their very first recordings, Laura Donnelly's voice and songwriting and the soundscapes and compositional talents of Andrea Gobbi and Keir Long have been the core of Laki Mera, a sophisticated music-making machine based at their own studio at Glasgow Green.
Other contributors have come and gone, most recently drummer Tim Harbinson, who is present on some of the recordings here, a collection that has come together over a considerable period of time since the band's last album, The Proximity Effect. If many of the ingredients are unchanged, this set – which is launched at Broadcast in Glasgow tonight – sounds a more organic piece of work, less concerned with a homogenous sound and more prepared to let every song have the instrumentation it most needs. So Leave A Burn features accompaniment written for brass trio by Donnelly and Long, and three tracks feature a quartet of strings.
Alongside Donnelly's oblique lyricism and some wonderful retro synth sounds, it is a rich concoction, but one that has an air of clearing the decks and leave-taking about it. Whether or not it is a last effort, it is a fine one, but what the three main protaganists do next may be the more interesting question.
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