A Triumphant, but Quiet, Return

Vashti Bunyan’s new album, “Lookaftering” (DiCristina), confirms a talent that has steadily gained momentum since re-entering music in 2000.The British singer-songwriter has haunted folk music with “Just Another Diamond Day,” an airy, almost whispery album of late-1960s folk rock, an album as interesting for the story behind it as for its songs. And while it’s near impossible to match legends 35 years into the myth-making, “Lookaftering” presents a mature take on what Bunyan did so singularly the first time out – an unusual, unmistakable voice, melodies that sound as finely spun as a spider’s web, and an undeniable grounding in mundane life.Bunyan’s 1970 debut, “Just Another Diamond Day,” became a precious stone shortly after its release – an obscure recording that accrued cult and purist devotion via its rarity. A vocalist discovered by the Rolling Stones’ manager-producer Andrew Loog Oldham, Bunyan recorded the album under the watchful ear of British folk producer Joe Boyd, who captured the delicate finery of Nick Drake’s “Five Leaves Left” and “Bryter Layter.” Backed by the Incredible String Band fiddler Robin Williamson and Fairport Convention guitarist banjoist Simon Niccol and guitarist mandolin player Dave Swarbrick, “Just Another Diamond Day” differed from the fertile crop of British folk at the time for its apparent lack of ambition. The percussion-less album features lithe string arrangements, but simplicity is its defining character, every sound and strum a mere backdrop for Banyun’s earthy, idyllic lyrics.The songs themselves were inspired by a nearly two-year horse-and-buggy journey Bunyan and her boyfriend took from London to a Scottish island owned by Donovan in the Outer Hebrides, to join other artists in forming a new society. The group disintegrated before they arrived, but Bunyan returned to London with an album of songs, which are filled with stories about plowing the land, grains of wheat, sacks of seed, lily ponds, and glow worms. She sings these lines in a high, breathy soprano like a voice plucked from an Orthodox church choir.“Just Another Diamond Day” was flatly ignored upon its release, and faced with the prospect of staying in London to promote an album already dismissed or retiring to Ireland to raise her family, she opted for the latter. And she might still be there, unknown and unsung, had her debut not percolated through the sort of collector circles that nurtured its fable-like creation. By the time of its 2000 reissue in Britain (it was reissued on CD last year in the U.S.),”Just Another Diamond Day” and Bunyan were heralded signposts for a new generation of folk singer-songwriters, including the winsome, harp-playing Joanna Newsom (whose idiosyncratic voice and puffy-sticker song stories sound personally indebted to Bunyan), the constantly morphing Animal Collective (which recorded a four-song EP with Bunyan earlier this year), and piedpiper Devendra Banhart.Both Newsom and Banhart appear on the new “Lookaftering,” but the songs, mood, and vibe are vintage Bunyan – intimate and almost naively bucolic yet laced with a sliver of the odd that lends everything an otherworldly patina. Her voice has aged, but isn’t distorted by the years; it’s still supple enough to convey an almost childlike wonder as it encounters the natural world, and her songs still feel stitched directly from the fabric of her life. “Days going by in clouds of flour and white washing / life getting lost in a world without end,” she sings on the domestic snapshot “Wayward.” Maternal impulses inform the opening cadenza of “Lately” as Bunyan’s plaintive voice chimes, “Never was much given to prayer / but lately I’m pleading with the air / to keep you safe from harm my dears.”An unseen sadness stalks Bunyan in the background of “Lookaftering.” “Hidden in your every move / are the words that you will never say,” she sings in “Hidden,” which starts off finding love in the unspoken moments of everyday life but ends wondering if one day she’ll learn that this man is nothing like what she had thought. In “Brother” a visit to an old home reveals that nothing’s changed, save “the only thing I see is you’re / not here now.” And in the heart-wrenching “Feet of Clay,” Bunyan smilingly asks a lover “not to waste your life on me” as if from the grave. These subtle details give “Lookaftering” a sense of mortality that contemporary folk rarely confronts, creating an emotional heaviness out of gossamer melodies. And with it, Bunyan has created an album that doesn’t live up to her storied debut but transcends it.

A Triumphant, but Quiet, Return

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