Just Another Diamond Day
I have an admission to make: although this album is much celebrated (an original copy in mint condition is currently on sale at £3,300 on Discogs) and plundered for adverts, I hadn’t listened to it prior to preparing this post.
Despite what the likes of Wikipedia will tell you, Vashti Bunyan has always claimed that she is not a folk singer and this is not folk music. She is correct. These are self-written songs, played with an acoustic accompaniment, with pastoral, occasionally naïve, overtones. Bunyan sings in a soprano that’s simultaneously sure and fragile, augmented by a touch of echo. With the exception of Window Over The Bay and Iris’s Song For Us, the songs have no link to the folk tradition and don’t adopt the idioms of folk music (the latter has a fine accompaniment by Dave Swarbrick).
Of the records I’ve listened to this year, the closest is probably Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms, another from a woman with her own mind and vision.
It’s a pleasant listen, and beautifully produced by Joe Boyd. I don’t understand quite how it has come to be so highly regarded though. It’s good, but not uniquely so, and there were times (Jog Along Bess) I found its naivety slid from being charming to mildly irritating, and I hankered for an uptempo number rather than constant reflective melancholy.
I listened on Spotify, and it’s also on YouTube (and there’s a cd for a lot les than £3,300).
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