Stella Sommer

★★★★ Northern Dancer NORTHERN DANCER. DL/LP German singer-songwriter’s arresting second solo album. The impressive Northern Dancer is the second solo album from Germany’s Stella Sommer, mainstay of the Hamburgbased art-poppers Die Heiterkeit. While their four albums were delivered in her native language, the lone and less poppy Sommer sings in English. Although piano or strummed guitar beds each song, colour comes from measured arrangements incorporating brass, strings, massed voices and distant percussion. Despite this corpus, what’s captured is resolutely intimate and reflective. Though she sounds a little like Dory Previn and

Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull, Sommer has a uniquely rounded intonation. The songs – especially the country-tinged 7 Sisters, the gently rolling Young Ghost, Old Century and the impressionistic We Only Part – have a filmic ebb and flow. If David Lynch wished to soundtrack a contemplative journey through a shadowfilled forest, he need look no further than Sommer. Kieron Tyler