At its best, Bear’s Den’s full-length debut is warm and cathartic and showcases a gift for folk-adjacent sensibilities with all the hopefulness to evolve in unexpected directions yet never losing their organic centre.
Islands fits very easily alongside the trio’s previous output. Lush flows of silky-smooth harmonies glide along a riverbed of soft strumming – the echoes of Marcus Mumford are hard to miss. Opening song ‘Agape’ unleashes a vibrant backbone of banjo served under a pillowy falsetto. ‘Above The Clouds Of Pompeii’ is laced with a gentle stream of fingerpicking, later completed with the addition of percussive lines and rumbling horns that together reach great heights.
From the moody synth current in ‘When You Break’, to the claps and rattles strung underneath ‘Think Of England’, to the tambourine threaded below ‘Magdalene’, this acoustically charged LP is infected with many a groove-worthy recording and clever, subtle hooks.
It is the fragile and emotional ‘Isaac’, however, that resonates most and sets the mind adrift into a golden brown wheat field, swaying in the silence of a treasure lost.
4/5.
Islandsis out Friday October 17 through Communion / Dew Process.
