KEATON HENSON

Six Lethargies MERCURY KX

8/10

Apprehensive folk star returns with stirring classical piece

Crippling anxiety has prevented the mercurial singer-songwriter and polymath Keaton Henson from performing the suite of fine albums he released earlier this decade. In response, he’s spent the past few years learning and exploring classical composition in an attempt to articulate the sensations of anxiety, mapping out his experiences across Six Lethargies, an intense and dizzying work recorded with the Liverpool Philharmonic earlier this year. In many ways it’s a dramatic shift from Henson’s time as a weather-beaten balladeer, yet there’s a timeless quality in all his music which suggests that, however he expresses himself, he’s a great surveyor of the human condition.