New Music: Hum & Hollow’s ‘Circles In The Wood’

Hum & Hollow are releasing their aptly named debut album ‘Circles In The Wood’. Brooke Burns and Alexander Cook (the other one), thematically wander through the wild as they dance across the line somewhere between singer/songwriter and acoustic trance.

The album is summed up well in the chorus of the stand-out track ‘The Truth Of My Existence’: ‘I ate the medicine/I’m outside my head again’. It’s beautiful, in an otherworldly sense, embracing a mysticism in our natural surroundings, but it’s easy to get lost in the reverb, and the echoing lyrics, and the percussive acoustic guitar. It’s hypnotic in the same way as staring into the ocean, or perhaps, more accurately, watching the swaying of the trees.

Having seen Hum & Hollow perform this summer, particularly at Folly Fest, it’s easy to imagine them preaching to the choir. The album is a celebration of being barefoot, and wandering, and wondering. Life lived with eyes looking upward and inward, and always with something between your toes. In short, all the better parts of festival life. But while it’s easy to imagine a crowd of festival kids swaying and spinning in a field to this, there’s a certain forlornness that emphasizes solitude, and strength in self-discovery.

‘Follow my shadow/Journey beside myself/I fear nothing of darkness/I bring forth its farewell/And you’ll find me dancing at the end/If you keep searching on, my friend/This Is my journey and I will walk with bare feet’

Overall it’s a fairly mellow album, with a few toe tapping highlights, and, most importantly, some exciting banjo bits. The fingerpicked guitar sounds like a workout for Cook, but where it shines is Burn’s haunting and imaginative lyrics, hinting at things we may never understand.