Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

We will crane our necks and look skyward with interest when a plane flies overhead, our imaginations, perhaps our in-built jealousies, will take over and wonder what it is like at that moment, to be so high, to witness the world changing rapidly from land to sailing the skies over vast oceans, and where those people are going to, what interesting events they will be part of, far from this distant shore. We will do this automatically and without concern, the moment fleeting and until the next plane goes over our heads, we will just lose interest in what takes to the air.

Because they are symbols of the every-day we forget casually the natural and the purity of all else that catches the attention of the wind and wonder of flight, we no longer instinctively know the names of the less common birds that share our world, and we don’t see the migration from the trees of the Leaves That Fly, we only curse their being as they cause us extra work keeping our lawns in perfect order.

It is to the organic that we should crane our necks in wonder at, the fabricated and the man made has its place, but not at the expense of the natural world, not at the way we see the falling of an oak leaf as its spirals to Earth in a cosmic ritual of performance, not in the way that it resembles the scraps of paper thrown to the floor which harbour the beginning of a train of thought that will untimely lead to a series of lyrics and passionate music.

This organic refrain, all that leaves our mind in the pursuit of what we actually mean is captured by Ullapool’s Kim Richards and her debut album, Leaves That Fly. It is this evoking of journey’s taken, by landscape and the understanding that time passes no matter how hard we try to invest in the artificial and manufactured which holds no sense of appreciating time, that Kim Richards, as well as the featured musicianship of Mike Vass, James Lindsay, Signy Jakobsdottir and Maireared Green, takes songs such First Love Becomes A Lad’s Hate, Ballade Of Autumn, Nothing To Show For It All, When The Leaves Grow, Footprints In The Snow and gives them a resonating heartbeat, a woman’s touch of beauty in a world that celebrates all too often the ugly achievement of the inexplicably assembled and mass produced.

An album of comprehension, an album of awareness in the natural, Leaves That Fly is a superbly arranged debut recording that will undoubtedly permits the listener to dream of higher branches of beauty.

Ian D. Hall