“Sparse, beautiful and ultimately pure”: Consequence of Sound

4 1/2 stars from Siobhan Kane at Consequence of Sound (also featured on the Time Magazine website):

“Using snow as a kind of landscape, it provides a sparse, beautiful, and ultimately pure backdrop for her creativity to soar … “Snowflake” … is a lovely way to start the record. It creates a conversation with mother and son and also with the earth and us, since the song suggests we are of the earth, yet “ice and dust and light”; we are at once flesh and blood, yet ethereal, unknowable. The haunting piano that flutters around the piece creates an emotional fragility, the “midnight of Christmas” McIntosh sings of. “The world is so loud,” Bush sings, so she sets about creating a place of stillness for us to travel to and be transported …“Lake Tahoe” begins with harmonies from tenor and counter tenor Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood that dissolve into a mournful piano composition, with Bush’s yearning, searching vocal … “Misty” is an almost fourteen minute piece of brilliance … The composition twists from a driving rhythmic kind of a song to something akin to spoken word, mixing up a jazz sensibility with a touch of folk, creating an exciting musical space…”