If every picture tells a story, then Jonathan Brennan’s handmade linocut print for Mark McCambridge’s new album cover, aka Arborist, acts as a visual map, neatly grouping several of the record’s underlying themes in isolated black-and-white silhouettes. Far from a concept album, Arborist’s fourth album, Looking For Love, explores love and its absence, using McCambridge’s hometown of Belfast as a microcosm for the wider world.
Although this is Arborist’s fourth album, it’s the first record McCambridge has self-produced in his home studio in Belfast. However, he’s still called on old friends from the community around him to help with Spacebomb’s resident bassist Cameron Ralston (Bonnie Light Horseman, Hiss Golden Messenger) featuring throughout, alongside Eamon Ferris (The Waterboys) on drums, while Grainne Meyer plays concert harp and Aga Olek violin on the title track.
Arborist has demonstrated a brilliant facility previously for being able to fully inhabit a song, while also demonstrating a real sense of place, on numbers such as Don’t Let The Sky Take Me from his last album in 2023, An Endless Sequence of Dead Zeros, in which McCambridge took the listener on a journey through County Antrim (where his mother originates) to Evishacrow, Legagrane and Tuftarney. And the title track here is no different. They say travel broadens the mind, but sometimes your hometown can offer equal inspiration. On the first single from the album, Looking for Love, its piano motif, arpeggiated harp, and ponderous drum sound help conjure a dream-like atmosphere equalled by its lyrical sense of isolation, while the song is simultaneously a paean to the happiness Arborist’s hometown brings him:
“The air is thick with static, down by the SS Nomadic”.
Here, the scattered references to Belfast landmarks – Queen’s Arcade, Albert Bridge and Titanic Slipways – are stopping points that act as mental maps of the city, while also serving as the backdrop to ponder the human conundrum of searching for love in a big city, and the paradox of feeling isolated while simultaneously surrounded by millions of people.
The sound of heavy rain falling at the end of Looking For Love finds its echo at the start of the follow-up song, Empty Handed, its world-weary sound perfectly matching the endless questing of those whose constant, fruitless search for the undiscovered – “it seems what we’re after is never on offer at all”– can never match lived experience and the beauty of the elements around us. The song plays out with lovely accompaniment from the Errigal Ensemble String Quartet, comprising Laura McFadden, Coleen McMullan, Lucy Drennan, and Maebh Martin.
The more uptempo-sounding Bye Bye Johnny Cash deals in more earthy matters: a fictional account of a character with a Man in Black T-shirt who makes all too frequent visits to a dancer in a club, our onanistic protagonist eventually coming to realise the unhealthy nature of his obsession (“Lord knows this lifestyle can’t go on”), the jaunty accompanying saxophone from Meilana Gillard here providing some much-needed light relief from the song’s subject matter.
By contrast, the whimsical-sounding Go Kill The Fattened Calf, with backing vocals from the Larne Community Youth Choir and Jonny Ashe’s fuzzed-out guitar, is a tender lament for McCambridge’s son, based on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The speed with which children grow up never stops a parent yearning for their eventual return: “I still hope to see your silhouette on the horizon yet”.
The frenetic, driving sound of Fire (“One hand on the wheel, One on the dash”), with some squonky, atonal brass instrumentation contrasts with its sedate, brief follow up, the instrumental A Dream of A Rose, with McCambridge at the helm of a Super 6 Synthesizer, blending a warm vintage 1980s analog charm with modern digital clarity.
The centrepiece of the album is the gently strummed I’ve Been a Flâneur, McCambridge fully demonstrating his poetic sensibilities and erudition – something of a tribute to both the late poet, Ciaran Carson – who was said to have drawn the streets of Belfast with his words, and Charles Baudelaire, the archetypal flâneur of the song’s title who is also mentioned in its lyrics. Like McCambridge with his eagle-eyed observation on this record, Baudelaire was renowned as a keen observer of people, deeply engaged in the sights, sounds, and rhythms of his urban environment, while retaining an air of detachment and independence. Unlike Baudelaire, though, McCambridge’s fictional spectator here also hopes to find love as a by-product of observing people’s behaviour, and is disappointed in his endeavour: “I’ve been naïve / I thought that love would show up, and offer some reprieve”.
Mark McCambridge was recently honoured with a “Fellowship” by the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, so, not surprisingly, there’s some beautiful poetry on show in key points of this song which amply demonstrate his lyrical acuity: “I saw a funeral cortège in the snow / I thought to trap it in a globe / But it was moving oh so slow.” But amusingly, the song descends into a humorous level of bathos at its conclusion, the elusiveness of love leading our failed lover to find belated respite through watching darts and snooker on the TV: “Littler to the oche, O’Sullivan to the baize / I’ve been looking to those boys, To get me through this phase”.
McCambridge’s ability to express a song in perfect miniature is also evident in the following Sono Io, sung entirely in Italian with acoustic guitar accompaniment: “Sono io, il tuo vero amore /Sono io, il tuo nemico giurato”. It translates as “It’s me, your true love / It’s me, your sworn enemy”, perfectly encapsulating the intense, passionate and turbulent nature of a love affair where your partner can simultaneously feel like both your greatest comfort and fiercest challenger.
Matters of the heart, and the ability of relationships to break down through miscommunication, are explored further on What Is It You’ve Been Asking (“But every word you say to me is like is like in some foreign tongue”) and the piano-led Exploded View (“I can’t tell if you’re in love or bored”), the latter song taking delight in the song’s repeated lyrical refrain as it fades out, à la Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
Saving perhaps the best for last is the album’s second single, The Taming of Horses. Arborist wrote the song in 2022, inspired by late nights watching Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, the landmark 1970s documentary about humanity’s cultural and scientific development. The song features lush Hammond organ that gives it a sophisticated feel, though its thematic territory is darker, reflecting humanity’s habit of repeating its worst mistakes. Layers of atmospheric instrumentation lift the tuneful keys and reinforce McCambridge’s ranging, melodic voice. His vocals flow in an engaging stream of thoughts, observations, and images, culminating in the repeated line, “time is all in our minds”.
In contrast to clock time, lived time comes from within – an internal, continuous flow shaped by feelings, experience, and how we interact with the world. One of Bronowski’s skills was the ability to stand slightly off-centre, see the unexpected in the familiar, and select imagery that captured the totality of the human experience and condition. Mark McCambridge shares this skill, and on Looking For Love he continues to set an extraordinarily high bar for composition, songwriting, and arrangement, making him a songwriter and musician whose every contribution is essential listening.
Looking for Love (October 16th, 2026) Fika Recordings
Live Dates
15th October: The Harrison, Belfast
25-27th October: Boia Festival, St.David’s, Wales
5th November: Cleere’s, Kilkenny, Ireland
6th November: Phil Grimes, Waterford, Ireland
12th Nov: The Cove, Hastings, England
15th Nov: The Waiting Room, London, England
17th Nov: Folklore Rooms, Brighton, England
19th Nov: The Empire, Belfast, Ireland
20th Nov: Yarn, Ballycastle, Ireland
22nd Nov: The Savoy, Cork, Ireland
26th Nov: Monroe’s, Galway, Ireland