Leah Senior - Pt. Roadknight LP

Somewhere between Sandy Denny’s arresting clarity and Vashti Bunyan’s gentle depth sits the luminous voice of Australian folk diviner Leah Senior. While the style and instrumentation of ‘70s Brit folk are touchstones on Senior’s forthcoming album, Pt. Roadknight, her disarming lyrics are fresh and wholehearted, wrestling with modern concerns of gentrification and isolation while finding solace in the quiet beauty of the Victoria surfcoast town where she lives. Though this is her first album with a U.S. label (released jointly by SPINSTER and Australian label Third Eye Stimuli), Leah Senior has been a shining star of the Australian folk scene for the past decade, touring extensively and sharing international stages with the likes of Wilco, Iron & Wine, Simon Joyner, Jessica Pratt, and King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. On Pt. Roadknight, her fifth studio album, Senior explores her introspective, nature-loving side while honing the singular baroque psych folk that has captivated listeners around the world.

Senior wrote the songs on Pt. Roadknight while she was living in a sandstone beach shack down a red dirt road in regional seaside village Anglesea in Victoria. In the summer the coastal town teemed with tourists on holiday, but in the winter it could feel deserted and grey. Both elements show up on the record. At times overcast and moody, at others frolicking and playful, the record narrates the seasons of the year within this season of Senior’s life, with all its tensions and contradictions: Breaking away from the city lent her artistic freedom, though she missed her vibrant creative community in Melbourne; she found peace in the deserted beachtown while bemoaning the clear wealth disparity visible in all the giant beachhouses left empty in the midst of a housing crisis. Grounding her throughout were the stunning natural surroundings and the hope implicit in the changing of the seasons, echoed in songs like “Blossoms of Spring,” the solstice song “Seasonal Rhyme,” and “Lovelily,” which she wrote while watching dragonflies dancing across the pond on cult folk hero Howard Eynon’s Tasmanian property.

The spirited lead single “Mothersong” kicks the album off on a high note, with Pentangle-esque guitar riffs, flute fanfares, and evocative blood harmony between Leah and her sister Andi Senior. Leah and her longtime musical collaborator Jesse Williams wrote the song to ease a friend’s anxiety as she transitioned into motherhood. Musically the duo set out to create a timeless and rollicking folk rock anthem they might play in 40 years as the long-time resident psych folk band at a local seaside festival. Both intentions come through in the song’s music video, which finds Leah and her bandmates in Victorian nursery attire, playfully engaging in a mother’s Blessingway ritual complete with giant puppets and Jodorowsky references.

On “Softly, Once Again,” with its Beatles-inspired pop inflections, Senior gives herself permission to approach her music on her own terms (while cheekily commenting on the oversaturation of punk music in Melbourne): So many punk bands in this town / So little said, for all that sound / Should I hitch my wagon to the band / And shout it out as loud as I can / Or play it softly once again. A microcosm of the album’s overarching theme, she’s grappling here with the balance between contemplative creative space and extroverted public output.

Leah wrote the third single “Two Weeks” after her neighbors tore down the quaint beach house next door and built in its place a towering grey monstrosity they rarely visited. Reminiscent of the sparse laments of Nick Drake, she sings over fingerpicked guitar and subtle piano, Everybody wants their block of land / Something in the city, something by the seaside / One day we’ll be asked to move along / Nothing lasts forever unless you put it in a song.

With its strong sense of place and ebbs and flows of mood that mimic the seasonal shifts of nature along the limestone coast, Pt. Roadknight turns its introspection outwards, sharing it with the listeners. Like the songs “Mothersong,” “Zoë,” and “Part of the Crowd”—each a love letter written to friends and experiences back in the city, Leah’s fifth studio album has an epistolary quality, its pensive, solitary tendencies are transformed into a resonant point of connection. As she sings on “Talk To Me,” (a nod to Joni Mitchell’s song of the same name), it’s a fine line between focus and retreat. –Third Eye Stimuli