Lisa Knapp

Till April Is Dead: A Garland Of May

The surreal leading the sublime in the merry morning of May. AS IS obvious from her excellent previous two albums, the voice of Lisa Knapp is a many splendoured thing; not for nothing she’s been compared to Kate Bush. Here, she creates a thematic twine of songs crafted from rituals symbolising the coming of summer, exploring and interpreting their history and mystery with equal relish, while producer Gerry Diver invests her with a characteristically leftfield cavalcade of sounds and arrangements, cuckoos and all. Graham Coxon guests on an eerie Searching For Lambs; David Tibet turns up to make the seriously unhinged Staines Morris even scarier; and Mary Hampton duets on the contrastingly dainty Bedfordshire May Day Carol. We also get radical re-imaginings of old favourites Hal-An-Tow and Padstow May Song as Knapp and Diver deliver ancient tradition with respect and beauty… yet manage to sound excitingly daring and enlightened as they do it.