Selk: Shed the Skin – colourful, weird and engaging

Seven years from their debut record, the atmospheric Beast, Selk – Anna Jordan and Dennis Cassidy – return with Shed the Skin. In some ways it sounds like an even more ambitious record, folding in beautiful string arrangements by Judith Ring, translated beautifully by Kate Ellis and Cora Venus Lunny.

It is a record that dances between delicacy and muscularity. Seconds showcases Jordan’s voice, so full of clarity, while folding in gorgeous percussive elements by Cassidy. Pure brings a sober piano melody that heaves and sighs in discordance, bringing to mind early Joan as Policewoman. There is a tenderness to Moments, and Spill weaves in lovely guitar with elegant strings that amplifies the song’s melancholy tone.

No Saviours somehow manages to sound world-weary and uplifting, and the piano-led Hammers sounds like an old music box spinning a sloping lullaby, prised apart by coaxing strings.

Shed the Skin is possibly the album’s highlight, like Tune-Yards singing a folk song. A pleasing distillation of a record that jumps around in places, it is colourful, weird and engaging. Memories is an evocative album closer, bringing to mind an air of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now but with an ambient wash, its gentle beauty and wispy spoken word drifting in and out to conjure a sense of being comforted and discomfited, an interesting place to be.