Andy Skellam - Brighten up the Place (2024)

Bristol-based Andy Skellam’s latest album, Brighten up the Place, is a stripped-back affair with songs (several recorded in his loft studio in the wee hours while everyone slept) addressing themes of loss, eco-anxiety, romantic escapism and a new father, sleep-deprived parenthood captured in his hushed baritone.

A languid folksy affair variously featuring contributions from such fellow Bristolians as Portishead bassist Jim Barr, keyboard player Alice Lacey, cellist Beth Porter, Jamie Whitby Coles of ‘This is The Kit’ on drums and vocalist Rachael Dadd, it opens with the circling watery pastoral fingerpicked notes of the five minutes plus Rosie Is A Goldmine (the cello here played by Sarah Moody), a tale of romantic rescue (“He fled home when he was young/A wistful soul with a silver tongue/Peered out through a periscope/When she beckoned him in from the wind and snow/Kick the dirt from your feet/We’ll find diamonds inside these bedsheets/And gold in our teeth said Rosie”), a similar idea spilling into the slightly more uptempo, puttering rhythm The Lapping Sea, Barr on double bass, even if a line about “Spilling my entrails on the floor” isn’t your usual love song metaphor.

Indeed, off-kilter imagery is something of a Skellam trait, the near six-minute Bloodhound musing on a “callous and crowded” world through such metaphors of fox roadkill (“Now he’s just a pile of red fur that lies at the side of the road/An old flame, a feast for the worms, a flag that will never be flown”) and miners using caged canaries to detect gas, while an image of homelessness, “these sleepers in doorways”, serves as a warning of societal collapse, “of a world about to implode, swallowed up whole by the sea”.

Such visions also inform the heady pastoral trip-hop swirl of Bluebird (“This life is a wing beat/On a landfill heap of all we plunder…We wait nervously here for empty words from wounded leaders/We wait nervously here for wounded words and who will lead us”), written during the hopelessness atmosphere of lockdown with its chorus inspired by the Bukowski poem of the same title, though, with the impending birth of his child, there is still a faint glimmer of hope in “Nestle with me and we’ll stay protected” against the coming landslide.

Dadd on backing, the intimately sung, softly picked, harmonica-haunted Wayward Heart also leans to love to “Keep out the flames” as he sings “We’ll build our tower to the clouds/Grow roots into the fallow ground/Your eyes would draw the miners from the dark/Take all this love from my wasting heart”. The tide of optimism also flows through Lisa’s Riding (“She’s starting fires on lonely streets, a starlet on the silver screen/You sit and watch from the treetops, and listen as she slips away”), his skill at creating mental landscapes deftly evidenced in the opening line – “the sky is grey, a stray cat scratches at the clay/From a river bridge you throw a stick and watch it as it floats away”.

Nick Drake influences (Kevin Ayers is another touchstone) peek through the strings laced Very Proud Of This One with another example of his weaving of evocative imagery in “When the sun spills its yolk into the blue sky/Pours liquid gold over the wheat fields/Twin oil lamps flicker in the old man’s eyes”, another song rooted in family and new parenthood (“Endlessly leafing through the same paperback/Same two pages stay fresh as daisies/He rests a gentle hand upon our baby’s head/And he says you must be very proud of this one”).

Porter on cello, again framed by a circling fingerpicked pattern, Weight Of The World is another five-minute track, here again capturing an image of a world in disrepair (“From this empty stage/All the seats are open/To the falling rain… In this mansion of moths there’s a hole in the roof”) but gently looking to ease the burden with “No one told you to shoulder the weight of the world but you …Autumn spills its leaves into the river/Frozen webs all/shimmer in the dew/And I hope you know I’m here with you”.

If not necessarily autobiographical, the penultimate bittersweet title track again suggests a family context, here concerning mortality and memory in the image of someone, a husband perhaps, bringing comfort to a wife with the flowers they grow (“You had so much to say/But you chose to stay quiet mostly/Work’s over for the day/And you’re unwinding in your greenhouse/Tending those strange plants from other worlds/And I’m sure you can relate to them/And I know who you grow them for/She fills the house with them/They keep her company/All day long”) as the mind shifts between past and present (“We even planted some inside your grave with you/Past and present tense/I’ve got it all mixed up again”).

That loss, of a parents perhaps, is at the heart of the lovely closing elegy that is the strings-dappled Soldier Of The Sun with its imagery of returning to nature (“Your race is run/Soldier of the sun/Feathers burned/Bright for everyone/Now you live in what grows from the forest floor/A fern a closed fist holding onto your/Star scattered dreams and your poetry/Lost in a foxglove, a bumblebee”), ending with the poignant benediction “So float where smoke rings are spiralling/Swim with the wake water rippling/And know you’re carried in our hearts forevermore”.

Andy Skellam’s Brighten Up the Place is a bountiful offering of well-crafted, warmly sung, surreally poetic and calming pastoral folk. His music deserves a far broader fan base, which his February album tour will undoubtedly help with (see dates below).