Nalle Wilder Shores Of Love

Limited to 500 copies on 180 gram vinyl. Across these seven tracks, Tuulikki adopts different personae to act out variations on the mythic themes of love and death that have informed British indigenous music for centuries. Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Chris Hladowski (with whom she also performs in The Family Elan) and viola player Aby Vulliamy, Tuulikki constructs poetic, timeless tales with arrangements that draw as much on 1960s acid folk and its 21st century descendants as they do on traditional music. In the ballad "Sunnes Return" her longing for physical dissolution, coupled with Hladowskis spidery, off-key electric guitar, creates something as creepy and haunted as an empty playground swing rocking by itself. "Lilly" is a dark vision of extinction and exile built around a heavy, Comus-like acoustic riff and hotwired with a spitting fuzz-guitar solo, in a similar vein to some of Ben Chasnys louder Six Organs Of Admittance moments. The stand-out track, "Songthrush" - which also features Scottish saxophonist Raymond McDonald and Alex Nielsen on drums, reprising the free jazz inflected playing that powered his own psych folk song project, Directing Hand - is a broiling, formless freak-out, borne aloft on Tuulikkis ecstatic, birdlike trilling. Its a breathtaking burst of magical energy, and easily some of the most convincing free-folk the UK has ever produced. -Daniel Spicer/Wire Magazine.