Julie Byrne - The Greater Wings

Exhibiting a slow but steady rise through the indie ranks, singer/songwriter Julie Byrne saw the 2014 release of a compilation of her earliest cassettes on Chicago's Orindal Records before moving on to Brooklyn label Ba Da Bing for the release of her full-length debut -- and broader critical breakthrough -- 2017's Not Even Happiness. That album impressed with a beauty and poignancy reflective of key influences like Vashti Bunyan and Joni Mitchell, as well as with Byrne's beguilingly smoky vocal tone and whispery delivery and a deceptively varied palette that navigated folk-style guitar, strings, and ambient synth accompaniment.

She returns six years later on Secretly affiliate Ghostly International with the follow-up, The Greater Wings, which integrates all of these qualities while raising the stakes in artistry. It begins with a sighing title track that opens with graceful acoustic guitar picking before reinforcing its ascending harmonic components and lyrical longing with glimmering string tones. It does this without stealing any of the spotlight from Byrne's poetic phrasing of lines like "I drank the air to be nearer to you/Voices widen through the room" and "Music in the walls/You were in the moment/With your life across the chord." The Greater Wings was partly inspired by touring life, periods of isolation, and the death of Not Even Happiness producer Eric Littmann, who had started work on The Greater Wings (the album was completed with Sigur Rós affiliate Alex Somers).

While grief and heartache are constant undertones here, they are often outshone by emotions like gratitude and anticipation, such as on the lucent "Summer Glass," a surprisingly electronics-forward synthesizer song that incorporates harp and strings to sweeping effect. It's followed by "Summer's End," an affecting instrumental coda the adds chimes and other melodic percussion to a similar, if muted, sound design. It's moments like this, the staticky intro to "Lightning Comes Up from the Ground," and the distant thunder-like, well-spaced drum strikes of "Conversation Is a Flowstate" that elevate what are already lovely songs to something that feels transformative. After the album closes with a hushed piano ode to letting go ("Death Is the Diamond," one of a handful of songs here that evidence Byrne writing on piano for the first time), listeners can only hope that she doesn't go another six years between albums. AllMusicGuide