A collection of brief encounters, which hinge on the slightest details and gestures: a written note, a fleeting facial expression, a movement of eyelashes. Little measurements that occasionally tip scales.

In contrast to 2009′s To Leave A Mark, Little Measurements is an album of collaborations. EL Heath contributes gorgeous ondes Martenot counter-melodies to the opener, A Year, and warm, sustained notes on the accordion to the closing track, Unwritten By Hand. Talk Less, Say More appears on The Visitor, providing fizzing drum beats and synth drones. James Taylor, formerly of Silver Gospel Runners, embellishes Not Aware and No One Else with delicate flourishes of slide guitar. Tim Wright of Neume Audio adds clarinet (Your Answer), glockenspiel (Little Measurements), and haunted attic sounds (From A Room) to the mix.

Tim Wright is even more prominent in his role as producer. Throughout the album, his subtle use of panning, sampling, and delay effects creates an intimate, and at times unsettling atmosphere.

Little Measurements is a wonderful record, mature in execution, stunning in detail. A compelling, beautiful, moving and lyrical work worth close attention and repeated careful listening, Little Measurements is a sublime, affective experience.

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Last year Les Étoiles returned to his home town of Bridgnorth, Shropshire. To Leave A Mark is a beautiful evocation of this place, its joy and tragedies, the town as a container of people, times, love and loss. It is about how a place, or better, the memories of a place, intertwine with one’s self, even when, on returning, those memories are not quite true. It is a testament to a ‘homesickness’ for ‘the memory of a home never seen’, to when the sediment of memory matches reality, but also to the more common moments when it does not.

Simply recorded in the front room of his parent’s home on guitar, keyboards and the drum machine on his grandfather’s organ and then carefully produced and mixed by Tim Wright, these are songs of rare warmth and real fragility, rich with emotion and detail. It is a collection to be cherished: one of sadness, joy and uncommon intensity.

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Never To Alight is a record of sparse, honest, intimate and beautiful songs.

It is a record of and for the liminal times: one of dawns, twilights and sunsets, almost glances and trickling epiphanies. It is a record of things half-remembered or half-forgotten; of fallen leaves and lost places, of ghosts and unopened attics, of joy, dread and longing. It is a record of old letters, pressed flowers and single battered photographs. It is a record of the mysteries of age, time, memory, love, loss and death: utterly transcendent even as it teeters on the edge of the abyss.

Lyrics

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