Not all music is about changing forms, breaking templates, kicking down musical barriers or creating new genres. Genres are so 20th century anyway. The best music seems to remind us of what has gone before whilst taking those sounds forward into bright new futures. Remissions is an album that falls into such territory.
Right from the start, Fingers feels like a long lost folk-jazz classic, a forgotten John Martyn track perhaps, and that is one hell of a place to launch an album from. There are moments that are both quirky sounding and deeply intimate such as Gina Rides A Tiger, and delicate and sensual with the classy duet, The Me (You Used To Know). Your Bud is a strange blend of Latin percussion and Mediterranean acoustica, frayed folk and sensual soul and Lincoln’s Lullaby reminds me of Damien Rice which can only be a good thing.
It’s a fine album, one that is both filled with unexpected sounds, and styles that seem to land just to the left of the genres they are forged from. But it is also an album that, once you have got your ear attuned properly to just what Byrd is doing here, you will slowly, or perhaps not so slowly, fall in love with.
