2014 has seen a fair few late lunges for the line in the race to be my best album of the year (a contest fought more for prestige and honour than hard cash in all honesty). I’m a mild-mannered sort, and hate disappointing the recording artists clearly hanging on my every word for validation, but Theo Parrish, Spectres and Craig Bratley will have to settle for commendations along with Goat, The War on Drugs, Peaking Lights and Klaus Johann Grobe this time. Jane Weaver’s The Silver Globe has taken gold – and done so with clear distance between it and the rest of the pack.
Where the concept behind Weaver’s last album, 2010’s The Fallen By Watch Bird, spawned a book, the overwhelming sense with The Silver Globe is of something no less narrative-driven, but more visual, and not just because of the head nods to Polish film director Andrzej Żuławski (On the Silver Globe, Possession) and Chilean counterpart Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain). The sheer range of colours and textures in this narrative of personal discovery and artistic freedom are redolent of a beautiful, hand-stitched quilt of individual story songs sewn together to create a stunningly beautiful and audaciously ambitious allegory.
The urgent immediacy of (almost) opener "Argent" and its near neighbour "The Electric Mountain" have clear musical touchstones in Soundcarriers and Broadcast, but that’s only the background to the story being spun here. In "Cells" and "Stealing Gold", we are led by the hand into a beautiful, bucolic landscape where we find maypole melodies that leave us spinning with their intuitive inventiveness. That Weaver has been bold enough to split these with a song as knowingly route one as the irresistable "Mission Desire" without compromising the heft or weave of the whole, is testament to her wholeness of vision as much as her songwriting prowess.
If you like the sound of it, don’t stream it, buy it. Own the thing – have the artefact. It’s a work of art and one that will repay you in spades.
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