Top Pick Lael Neale: Altogether Stranger (Vinyl LP) | Freebird Records

Altogether Stranger was conceived after three years of oscillating between rural solitude and urban chaos. Neale explains: “On returning to Los Angeles I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity.” The 32 minute album finds Neale perched at the piano in a hilltop bungalow, looking down on a rare curve of Sunset Blvd. Here, in this daily ritual of writing, singing, and painting – what David Lynch referred to as “the Art Life” – she creates the space for her most adventurous work to date.

The album’s centrepiece, “Tell Me How To Be Here,” paints a stark and haunting portrait of her return to Los Angeles, transmuting a dissociative unease into a woozy, dreamlike reverie, echoing the Velvet Underground with the distant chime of “Sunday Morning” bells. Neale’s crystalline voice floats above Blakeslee’s ambient tape loops and ghostly, disintegrating Mellotron, evoking the disorientation of waking up in a world that feels so ordinary it becomes strange.

Magenta vinyl version.

1. Wild Waters
   
2. All Good Things Will Come To Pass
   
3. Down On The Freeway
   
4. Sleep Through The Long Night
   
5. Come On
   
6. Tell Me How To Be Here
   
7. New Ages
8. All Is Never Lost
   
9. There From Here