Stephanie Dosen - A Lily For The Spectre (Bella Union)
UK release date: 4 June 2007
track listing
1. This Joy
2. Vinalhaven Harbour
3. Only Getting Better
4. Owl In The Dark
5. Death And The Maiden
6. Like A Dream
7. Way Out
8. Lakes Of Canada
9. Daydreamers
10. By And By
11. A Lily For The Spectre
The great thing about record label samplers is that
the best ones can have you salivating for a whole
year, waiting to discover the musical promises they
dangled in front of you months before debut albums
actually hit the racks and download sites.
So it was earlier this year with Bella Union's
Beneath The Surface sampler, which introduced us to
Stephanie Dosen with a big grin on its face and a
wagging finger telling us to have patience. Good
things come to those who wait.
And now here it is, her debut album A Lily For The
Spectre, hiding exactly the kind of music you'd expect
behind a title like that: spectral and fragile, gentle
and lilting, filled with finger-plucked acoustic
guitars and harp-like melodies. Sitting somewhere
between a more summery All About Eve and a
village green folk festival, she drifts in on a warm
breeze, floating along a clear and still summer stream
to lap at the shore.
Originally, claims her press material, Stephanie
composed songs for boys at school and now mostly
writes for "ghosts gone astray". You can easily
imagine her calming down the dearly departed,
convincing them to abandon nasty habits such as
haunting and instead sitting with them on the dusty
steps of a crumbling old house as she plucks an
acoustic guitar and they accompany her on cobwebs with
the sun shining gently through the cracks in the
boarded up windows.
Yes, at times it sounds like a lost 4AD demo tape
welcomed back into the fold, but if you like that sort
of thing there's plenty to recommend it. Dosen's voice
is soothing and gentle, while her excellent
musicianship wafts guitars, pianos and beautiful
compositions through the air (check out Vinalhaven
Harbour in particular) towards our waiting ears.
There's a sense of happy innocence about it all, as
though she's writing songs for the swans that swim
past her garden gate and the forest creatures that
wander up to her window to listen, always staying on
the right side of melancholy.
If this is making it all sound too twee, I
apologise - the fault is mine, not hers. Songs such as
the whispery Daydreamers have that effect, forcing out
of you a sublime grin that's sure nothing could
possibly be wrong with the world.
There's no shortage of fragile singer-songwriters
in the musical world, nor girl singers with gentle,
high-pitched harmonies and piano-drenched folk
melodies but that doesn't mean we can't find room for
more.
The best music is that which you can not only
imagine putting on in the right company to soundtrack
particular activities - polite dinner party, all-night
rave - but music that lends itself to an entire world
when you close your eyes and lose yourself in it.
Stephanie Dosen is a mid-evening performer on the
village bandstand at Bestival, a clearing in
the trees at Glastonbury, when the candles are
flickering on the hillside, the sun is going down and
you need a dose of spiritual pep following a couple of
days of partying too hard and too long in the dance
tents. With the grass beneath your feet and the sun
gently sinking behind the horizon, this is the music
you should be listening to.