Indeed both La Grande and Idealistic Animals add some vivacious flicker to the slow-roasting embers of the New Year as Gibson and Cheri MacNeil masterfully entangle tales both cautionary and cutesy with staccato twangs of acoustic guitar, with these yarn-like knots subtly weaved with flutters of slight rhythms and periodically lavish orchestrations. Like a fidgety, jittery alley cat, we urge you to bat away...
La Grande is Gibson's sixth studio stab, and personifies her most quietly accomplished yet. The Fire, for instance, borders on the unabashedly overblown, somewhere along the lines of her namesake Marling's musical spleen rupturing only for vividly agitated tambourines and Hammond organs to pour from gushing internal abdomen. Elsewhere her porcelain warble embodies the hollow longing and general desolation of that of Devendra Banhart on Lion/Lamb, sounding as if yodelled from the pinnacle of a distant mound come sunrise. Drifting through sheets and miles of opaque mist, its magic, its majesty can be accredited to its inexplicable intimacy as plinks of ebony and ivory and the distinctive rustling of oboes whisper in the ear from what feels like inimitably close proximity. That they're offset by surges of the extreme and industrial may superficially suggest a distancing or perhaps distracting interjection into the general melange yet it only stokes the warmth at the core of the work, augmenting any affection for La Grande. Intermittently Gibson is attracted to ambling and anticipated chord progression like a wearied voyager to moonlit glimmer atop mirage-enslaved pool, wandering with little cause to conclusions of little significance as on the perfectly mellifluous yet ultimately aimless Time Is Not, or the She & Him-ish Red Moon. Nonetheless if the cosy sentiments of Skin Warming Skin don't get every mm2 of dermis tingling feverishly it may be worth checking for pulse.
Well, one mere mortal may contend, because the fibres of the music within – moral or otherwise – once intertwined with coils of fleshy brain and memory, prance through lobes with conviction and veritably unerring determination. Chemical reactions ensue, and often result in delight: MacNeil ushers in darkness and despair via openly jaunty soundtrack and a herd of bestial metaphors, some substantially more effective and/or endearing than others. Thus Idealistic Animals becomes akin to the Jehova's Witness' thump on the front door, a dramatic and in many ways unsettling reminder of music's and indeed of humans' irrefutably impactive potential: the autumnal slump of Earthworm (All Hail Our Ailing Mother) comes across as Dark Dark Dark trundling off the garden path into a shrub-laden unknown to then encounter Joanna Newsom sat atop a toadstool rooted precariously beneath a dilapidated wall of intricate musical layering that's consistently, persistently on the point of crumble. Monkey (You Can Go Home) meanwhile glitters with the tendencies of musics contemporary in place of chamber, like Feist rejigging Midnight City while MAN (Idealistic Animals) is about as hymnal as it gets, as monumental as the gloriously woebegone Adiemus, crashes of cymbal parting, subsequently allowing MacNeil's forceful vox to pass through to the mix's very fore. Riding atop the crest of a rolling bass-fuelled bridge she quips: "we like to feel like we are free / we make up something to believe" and as uncomfortable a snarl this may be for the adherents and agnostics among us, such assurance certainly heightens our faith in she as well as in this recurringly impressive and engaging record.
