Album Review: Luster by Maria Somerville

There's a perfect place to listen to Luster. It's probably just before sunrise, and the streetlamps are about to dim. It's cold enough to see your breath, but the vapour quickly gets lost in the mist that surrounds you. The pavements are quiet, just you and your headphones. But the magic of Maria ….

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Maria Somerville's 'Luster' is a remarkable album - a beautiful, thrilling, fascinating experience, one that matches the tranquil and the bucolic to emotional complexity. Sensually stunning, it feels unified but also hard to pin down; a record that muses on the uncanny, fuelled by sights experienced from the corner of your eye, there's an apt halo of magic to what Maria Somerville has achieved here. Her debut project on 4AD , 'Luster' follows the word-of-mouth success fostered by 2019's 'All My People' .

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Ever venture as far west as Connemara and you'll understand why the area is a time-old pull for artists. Yeats honeymooned there. Oscar Wilde's father kept a summer house on the shores of Lough Corrib, the same lake that inspired Pat O'Shea's 1985 children's fantasy tale 'The Hounds of the Morrigan'. A mountainous region on Ireland's Atlantic coast, Connemara feels ancient - in part because it's a Gaeltacht, a district where Irish is the dominant language at home - and yoked so tightly to the country's traditional culture that it's hard to write about the landscape without falling into adjective-laden cliché.

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