I’ve meant to feature this album for a long time coming. The debut album from Annabel (lee)  the project from Annabel and Richard E has been around a few months and I feel it’s been overlooked. I’m not about to get ahead of myself and start naming my best albums of 2015 just yet, but suffice to say that this record will definitely be featuring somewhere on the list.

The 10-track album is gorgeously sophisticated with swirling instrumentation and haunting vocals. It blends soul, folk and jazz, invoking the haunting classicism of Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, intermingled with the quiet folklore of Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell, and tipped with the jazz stylings of Miles Davis and Billie Holiday, it’s bloody amazing. Her eerily dark vocals add a certain rawness to the mysterious soundscapes.

The press release sums up the record perfectly:

“Annabel (lee)’s debut album By the sea… and other solitary places is a hypnotic, vivid, incantatory masterpiece – the sort of album that will define passages of its listeners’ lives thereafter they hear it.”

Can’t wait to hear more from Annabel (lee)…but for now  get into the musical trance of By the sea… and other solitary places.

This will be arguably the best 40 minutes you will spend listening to music today!

9/10