Rachel Taylor-Beales - Out Of This Frame (2022)

Cast your mind back a few weeks to the intense heatwave of the summer, the climate crisis in action burning down on us amid the capitalist freefall the world seems to have plunged towards; that is where Rachel Taylor-Beales‘s head must have been when she cut the scorching opening track to this album, Just Look At You Now. As she sings the repeated line, “sometimes the heat, it gets you down,” a piercing violin melts your skin as Rachel’s voice is pushed to extremes of anguish, undercut by a desire to fight on. That sense of pushing on is intertwined with artisanal folk throughout these songs, all of which exude a sense of post-trauma awakening. That same spirit inhabits the title track Out Of This Frame, a stately song of human endurance, a bittersweet motion in music that is also elevated by the violin embellishments. In other sections of this song suite, Rachel focuses her attention on individuals to discreetly illustrate how the cut-throat modern world can be so ruthless, as with her ode to the fire spinner Steffi Wulf on Fire Girl. Then there are the truly darker corners of this album, such as February 29th, which is painfully bleak in its themes of displacement and includes the desperate line “I’ve seen so many hells already”. That said, the album does close on an uplift with Last Chance Parade, a hopeful reflection on murmuration and the power of an attuned collective, be it musical or social.

Other segments display Taylor-Beales’s flair for oblique artiness. However, I now know that Fibonacci’s Train is about insomnia thanks to the Out Of This Frame album packaging, furnished as it is with lavish attention to detail, so much colour and visual stimulation, so much detail and insightful accompanying text. This is, in short, a wholly satisfying release to behold in every way; it is the kind of substantial presentation that a real artist deserves, and the music it is wrapping itself around positively simmers with the depth surrounding it. Not that the music needs any additional fuel, but this album is an accomplished set from a forward-thinking singer-songwriter whose warm acoustic sensibilities and imaginative mind erupt with colour and ideas. It is a wholly satisfying twelve-song collection that can be enjoyed as a lush audio experience, but I would strongly recommend the deep dive approach with all the writing, painting, retrospection and recollection that comes with it; with Out Of This Frame, Taylor-Beales expresses large on a widescreen canvas that allows room for all her artistic faculties to breathe.

This is Rachel’s fifth solo album, and whilst it is built around her singular vision, the approach invites room for musical collaborators too. These include her husband Bill and daughter Polly whose spoken word contributions are especially haunting on Shoot The Moon, a sentient voice in the darkness imagined by the song’s narrator imploring for the big cheese to be shot out of the sky. These two close personal collaborators are honoured with superb portraits by Rachel, both of which bring their personalities to the fore. Violinist Lucy Rivers and accordionist Stacey Blythe are similarly captured with reproductions of original acrylic on canvas paintings within the pages of the hardback book package. In fact, the whole presentation features a veritable gallery of artwork by Rachel and Bill that, even to an amateur’s eye such as mine, does demand attention for the quality of the work. It does not end there; the whole experience is also fleshed out with thematic photography and a stream-of-consciousness prose by Rachel that progresses and evolves over thirteen parts.

As if all the imagery, ideas, dreams, and themes that Rachel presents with this project are not enough, she also begins the introduction with the news that she currently faces a battle to regain the use of her singing voice. Sometime after the album was completed, a medical issue related to acid reflux left her with the worst possible recovery battle a singer could wish to face, but, as the notes go on to recall, she has bounced back before, most notably from the injuries sustained in a 2012 accident. But that all add to the vitality of the multi-faceted artistic expressions on display here. To quote Patti Smith, as Rachel also does in the liner notes, artists don’t stop being artists; they just shift conditions. But I have to bring all this back around to the music, for that is, after all, the meat on the bone of any album release. These are a collection of songs that meditate on a range of cares, interests, inspirations and impulses. There is an especially warm tribute to Jackie Leven; Signal is a floating impression on waking from a dream where images of inhabiting a whale stimulated her mind; Rachel’s literate imagination runs wild on The Ballad Of Pandora And Eve, in which conversation between two mythological women is framed as a brilliant story of reclamation. These songs were all brought to life over time, primarily during the pandemic years and have been nurtured into being with all due attention to sonic detail. They are harvested as acoustic folk, but they yield many flavours, including Americana, baroque, blues, jazz and a sharp alternative cutting edge. This is an album that invites you in for a long ride, and it will not disappoint those who invest the time to get on board.