Daylight Saving

On Daylight Saving, the second album for Alasdair Roberts’s group Appendix Out, songs morph into mysterious things — requiems, hymnals, chants, many sung from deep inside hermetic enclaves. If the album’s predecessor, The Rye Bears A Poison, lacked a little for focus, Daylight Saving is remarkable in the security of its vision — everything here’s of a piece, Roberts’s crepuscular songs threaded together by a cast of players who shade in the material with the most sympathetic tones. Floating somewhere between a very British, earthen art-rock, and the experiments that characterised the best seventies folk albums — think Shirley Collins’s No Roses, or Steeleye Span’s Please to See the King — it’s a gorgeous set of illuminated song forms, reaching its apogee with the extended, unravelled melodies of “Merchant City” and “Exile.”