Chris Brain – Steady Away (Album Review)

Chris Brain – Steady Away (Big Sun Records) 6th October 2023

Coming just over a year after his first album Bound to Rise, Leeds-based singer-songwriter Chris Brain’s sophomore effort switches the focus inwards and gives us a selection of more introspective and reflective songs than his more pastoral and wide-eyed debut. The fresh and minimal band is almost exactly the same on Steady Away, with Simeon and Mary-Jane Walker returning on piano and violin, respectively, but for this one, Chris has added the string bass of Alice Phelps, a significant detail, with her low notes bringing a more serious bent to some of these tightly written songs.

Tracks like the reverent Golden Eagle or the light and carefree Flying on Time from Bound to Rise are less frequent here, with the appropriate naivety of those songs replaced by pieces that suggest maturity and experience. A case in point is Curse, a song built on Chris’s signature chordal acoustic guitar picking and containing lines like ‘caught in the frozen grip of a curse that’s spreading through.’ The introduction of violin a third in adds to the quietly unfolding drama of the song, with lower notes sweeping through while the beautifully understated bass acts as an unlikely bright spot.

The comparisons to Nick Drake are unavoidable, both in Chris’s playing and singing (there is even a ‘hazy dream’ lyric in Curse that could be a nod to Drake’s Hazey Jane), but Chris is anything but an emulator, with fresh arrangements shifting the mood in seconds. The pretty and upbeat introduction to Silence is particularly pleasing, with Phelps’s double bass again adding light to the mix (the occasional buzz from the thick bass strings is a lovely detail), especially when joined by the twinkling piano notes.

More serious and stoic in tone is the title track, which blends an American primitive-esque thumb-heavy guitar part with a softly but eerily droning violin and a creeping bass line. Lyrics like ‘play the game, state your claim / we’ll see who’s to blame’ bring some steel into Chris’s writing, an edge that is countered by his solid playing on the higher strings, while wonderful bowed notes sneak in the background and create drama and tension.

Seemingly the antithesis to this are songs like opener Golden Days, a pure and summery number, with Chris’s picked line joined by the subtlest of bass parts, sweeping violin and spare piano chords. Lines like ‘Oh lover, it’s our time / These are our golden days’ suggest being in the moment, but are there the merest hints of melancholy at what is perhaps to come in some of the minor notes? The uncertainty perhaps lurking behind the more obvious playing is where cleverness creeps into Chris’s sound; an apparently simple affirmation of life and love is cast into doubt by the slightest of musical decisions, which adds layers of interest to the songs.

Elsewhere, we have a splendid instrumental track titled, wait for it, Instrumental, a lovely bucolic undulating piece of solo acoustic guitar playing that sounds like the flowing of a lively river and could belong on Jim Ghedi’s Hymn for Ancient Land album. It slips straight into Weeping Willow, another solo piece, this one a sweet commentary on the change of seasons through the lens of the titular tree and crafted around a bright guitar part.

Final song, Now Westlin Winds, is an impeccable take on Dick Gaughan’s own version of Robert Burns’s song and contains the niftiest of Chris’s guitar playing. Hammer on and pull off techniques are employed to embellish a lovely instrumental backing to a beautiful song that brings to mind early Chris Wood and Kris Drever songs, as well as Gaughan’s own music. There is romance here, certainly (‘As the silent moon shines clearly, I’ll clasp your waist and fondly press and swear I love you dearly’), but folded in is anxiety and quiet rage (‘Now westlin winds, and slaughtering guns, bring Autumn’s pleasant weather’). The song as a metaphor for humanity’s power through love and destruction of nature is more pertinent now than ever, and Chris’s version is beautiful, equalling the magic of Gaughan’s own.

Steady Away is everything a second album should be; it stays with a formula that worked very well on his debut and adds depth and guts. The writing has been elevated, as has the playing, and there is confidence at every turn, as the handling of the final song suggests. At once intelligently written and considerately handled by all involved, this is an excellent album by a musician really starting to bloom.