Pitchfork

The 2005 self-titled debut album by Songs of Green Pheasant (aka schoolteacher/artist Duncan Sumpner) seemed to have emerged almost by chance. Home-recorded on four-track in Sumpner's Sheffield kitchen, the lo-fi album existed for years as a demo kicking around Fat Cat's offices, the label temporarily unable to locate the music's author. A softly captivating work of gauzy folk and dreampop, the album benefited from the type of gradual, organic discovery that's virtually impossible to duplicate. Now firmly established on Fat Cat's roster, Songs of Green Pheasant's latest release, Aerial Days, initially appears to be a more ambitious production, with Sumpner doubling himself up from four to eight-track. Yet despite this enhanced fidelity, he manages to sustain his debut's deliberate sense of isolation, sounding every bit as temporally displaced even as he moves away from that album's folk-based syntax.

On his debut, Sumpner's use of acoustic guitars and pastoral Peak District imagery understandably caused him to get caught up in the ongoing neo-folk currents, and Aerial Days clearly still contains the barest echoes of Nick Drake or Simon & Garfunkel. But here, Sumpner has evidently taken greater care to enrich his music's levels of dissolved oxygen, fortifying each of these tracks with acres of weightless guitar FX and reverb-drenched piano. Once again Sumpner has produced and performed nearly everything himself, and in doing so he firmly re-aligns Song of Green Pheasant's genealogy not amongst the folkies but instead within the ethereal, post-shoegaze lineage of such acts as Flying Saucer Attack or Piano Magic. It's a sphere in which Sumpner clearly feels most comfortable-- perhaps a bit too comfortable-- yet most often his translucent melodies and subtle arrangements prove sturdy enough to avoid their simply drifting off into the celestial twilight.

Like so many albums conceived in solitude, Aerial Days is best appreciated alone. The concentric reverberations of the opening "Pink by White" effectively mirror the song's whispers of memory and desire, a scarcely hidden undercurrent of guitar distortion coursing beneath in the still, autumnal darkness. This quiet undertow of dissonance crops up repeatedly throughout the album, as on "Remembering and Forgetting", when Sumpner's lush vocal harmonies are interrupted by the introduction of a detuned tack piano that chimes with the decrepit nagging of an antique grandfather clock. The album's lyrics are often too hushed and blurred to draw strict conclusions; rather, the impact is one of grainy disconnection, as though these songs are an attempt to recreate a specific scene through the buried language of dreams and half-remembered fragments.

This diffuse, spectral approach can lead Songs of Green Pheasant to vistas of astonishing beauty, particularly on "Wolves Amongst Snowmen", which gently opens out into a dazzling guitar panorama, or on the instrumental "Brody Jacket" which closes the album with a lyrical, yearning pulse of trumpet and submerged guitar. Unfortunately, though, Aerial Days' sense of disconnect also extends to the album's structure itself, often leaving these songs to appear as orphans rather than as a cohesive whole. This effect is especially apparent on the album's cover of "Dear Prudence", originally recorded for a John Lennon tribute on Radio One, that goes precisely as far as you'd expect it to and no further. At heart, perhaps, this is the track that best illustrates the challenges that now face Songs of Green Pheasant, as Sumpner is forced to balance his music's enrapturing seclusion with the need to eventually move his work beyond its familiar comfort zone.