Sally Anne Morgan

Adding to her menagerie of recent releases both with and without The Black Twig Pickers, Sally Anne Morgan’s latest solo outing stands in a bit of a stark contrast to last year’s Thread. Where that album envisioned a sun-streaked garden, lush and laden like a memory-box grown from the soil, here Morgan is in a more meditative state. The songs are stripped back. Gone are her vocals, and instead the focus is thrown to the interaction between her instruments — fiddle, banjo, and guitar. As Morgan has stated, here the intent is on creating moments. The record unfurls, twisting its vines through the strings, blocking out the perfume of her previous garden and focusing in on the more delicate details in the flora.

By reigning in her scope, Morgan has created a record that’s a meditative idyll. The lines of her fiddle roll over in the mind like stuck thoughts on “Sandbox” or banter with banjo barbs on “Prune” but against the overcast air of her backdrop, they give the mind space to work through her sketches of serenity. While I was enamored with the full scope of Thread, I’m happy to hear Sally’s fiddle in any context and this pulls it into the foreground as a glowing focal point. If you need a bit of spiritual realignment, then Cups is a necessity, a moment of peace in a punishing world.

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