Joan Shelley

The newly rooted songwriter’s best album yet. ★★★★ The Spur NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP

In a season of loss and isolation, Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg married and had their first child. Fittingly, her seventh solo LP is concerned with harmony: between lovers and warring impulses; polarised communities and man and nature: Amberlit Morning, a duet with latter-day domestic bard Bill Callahan – the croaking bullfrog to her birdsong clarity – contemplates romantic and earthly interdependence. The nuanced writing, full of tender challenges to lost souls, and Shelley’s warmest sound yet (produced again by James Elkington) make the case for such balance. The sometimes distancing elegance of her prior albums dissolves as she finds new registers – singing from the gut on When The Light Is Dying and Like The Thunder, which hones her underrated carnal writing – and there is a newly confident intuition here, as when the title track ripples from Western-tinged tangle to meditative raga.