Beautiful You –  Matthew Mayer (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Sitting somewhere between classic piano balladry and ambient mood music, Beautiful You is an album of chilled, calming and wholly beautify instrumental pieces. Music is normally written about on sites such as this for what it is actually doing, the mechanics and the musical make up, the references and where it fits in the musical canon. This album foregoes any such academic approaches and the only thing that needs to be discussed is the affect that the music has on the listener, which, after all, is the purest of reasons for making music in the first place.

Cascading progressions of notes are finely balanced by space and anticipation, plaintive yet powerful refrains and confident yet minimal motifs drive the various tracks, tracks built out of classic grandeur, out of timeless grace, from ethereal composition and the understanding that fewer, more carefully selected sonic building blocks are always the best approach.

And so with often so little music actually taking place, with the music merely framing silence, it is the beauty of the world around us that we are actually listening too and Matthew Mayer is content just to underline its presence and add gentle colour and clever shading to this already beguiling canvas. All of this means that when he does make a point of saying something musically it feels like the most powerful and potent of expressions.