I’ll give you the bare bones of the low down on Josienne Clarke and invite you to dig deeper. She’s a singer songwriter who has risen to a respectable and acclaimed status, award winning even, as part of a traditional folk duo in which the relationship between herself and her partner turned dramatically sour and lead to an irreversible on stage parting of the ways. Her new solo album picks apart the debris of that relationship in, at times, unforgivingly graphic detail. It’s the sound of an artist finding their true voice, letting off steam, working through some challenging emotional baggage and audibly growing in confidence as we listen. The album, ‘A Small Unknowable Thing’, released on Corduroy Punk Records, is an intense and rewarding listen from the same lineage that bought us Bob Dylan’s ‘Blood On The Tracks’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ and John Grants ‘Queen Of Denmark’. The above film for the track ‘The Collector’ says it all visually for me, in the way that it portrays the artist looking at times fragile and diffident but resolutely determined in her preparation to fly. There doesn’t seem to be a vinyl edition available yet but this one’s going to rise to the top of the 2021 album pile all the same, I’m certain of that.

https://www.discogs.com/Josienne-Clarke-A-Small-Unknowable-Thing/release/19946713