Good Shepherd – Let’s See What The East Wind Brings
Good Shepherd – ‘Let’s See What The East Wind Brings’ (Rusted Rail Records)
Review by Paul Lockett
Let’s See What The East Wind Brings is the debut album from Good Shepherd, the moniker of Cambridgeshire-based Duncan Poyser. The songs themselves were originally recorded between 2005 and 2010. There’s an underlying simplicity across all the tracks and Poyser prefers to keep things relatively simple and build a small handful of layers to the songs, allowing lots of space and warmth across the album.
It’s very easy to imagine this collection of songs being played in a fireside setting. He brings the outside inside with this folksy collection of songs.
‘Slow Down’ has an ‘almost there’ vocal which builds nicely into the harmony-driven chorus. Similarly, ‘Sunday Morning’s Son’ has a feel which would appeal to fans of Fleet Foxes or The Low Anthem. There’s a revolving acoustic guitar riff throughout with elements of percussion which brings to mind the crashing of waves.
Elsewhere, tracks such as ‘Lungs On Fire’ have an almost drone-like quality which works really nicely against the more acoustic folk backdrop of the majority of tracks.
This album has an honest feel; the songs are stripped-back and bare, allowing no place to hide. ‘Sing Again’, for example, has the simplest and most effective of guitar riffs, combined with a vocal which works so well to carry the song because everything else which might usually be present in a song like this has been omitted by design. ‘End Of All’, in contrast, fades with the sound of a distorted drone guitar and allows the album to go out with a bang rather than near-silence.
In short, a rather lovely collection of songs which will appeal to fans of minimalist folk which pull on the heartstrings.