Chris Brain shares new album ‘Red Sun Rising’
The Yorkshire-based musician delivers an exceptional offering.
★★★★☆
Photo: Nick Porter
Red Sun Rising is an album that is made to be listened to during springtime, and its early May release really couldn’t be timelier. The album is the Yorkshire-based folk singer’s fourth record and is his most quietly powerful collection of songs yet. It is littered with songs about bright early mornings, fresh dawns and new awakenings and is perfect for the warmer air and brighter days of Spring ahead of us.
Chris Brain’s vocals have the perfect mix of earthiness and breeze. It is reminiscent of Richard Thompson’s brooding, low-pitched yet comforting vocal style. One of the standout songs, Kinds of Kindness, perhaps best typifies this. Brain’s soothing, sorrowful vocals are impossible not to connect with and be moved by.
The album opens with its title track, and it’s a perfect lead into what Chris Brain and British folk music more generally is all about. It sounds like the sort of blissfully familiar song that has been spun around in folk circles for decades already. It sounds absolutely timeless. The title refrain loops throughout the song effortlessly in much the same way as the traditional folk classics of generations gone by.
From a musical and songwriting perspective, it certainly evokes Nick Drake. In fact, just the album title alone, Red Sun Rising, calls back to the third and final Drake masterpiece, Pink Moon. It’s easy to be dismissive of music that so closely resembles music of the past, but with traditional folk music, it’s almost the point. It’s a genre that’s lineage spans back generations, and each new folk singer is merely acting as another link in the chain of time and history, more out of preservation than creation. Besides, having the talent to carry on that torch so effectively is incredibly impressive in its own right.
The songs and performances on Red Sun Rising do more than just keep the circle of folk music unbroken. They are warm, peaceful, soothing, and so incredibly comforting to spend time with. They are simply made to be listened to on bright spring mornings or warm summer nights.
This album is incredibly direct. It’s intimate without feeling voyeuristic. It can often be a cliché, but it feels like Chris himself is actually there singing these songs in the room to you. You really can feel the breath of the vocals as he sings closely and directly into the microphone. Brain does this without sacrificing any of the audio fidelity, and it really is such a uniquely personal experience to listen to these songs, especially with headphones. Morning’s Relief, for example, sounds quietly devastating. Its sparse arrangement mirrors the minimalist arrangements on the rest of the album. Any elaborate instrumentation would simply get in the way of the song and the emotion that Brain is trying to convey.
Red Sun Rising is an incredibly warm and consistent set of songs that see’s Brain doing just what he does best – providing yet another beautiful link in the long chain of British folk music. There might be many more people putting links into that chain, but not many are doing it as beautifully and thoughtfully as Chris Brain at the moment.
Red Sun Rising is out now via Big Sun Records.
