The third album release by cult instrumentalists, littlebow, signals the addition of folk/early music harpist/vocalist Brona McVittie into the bands’ complex musical fold, joining mainstays Katie English (Isnaj Dui, The Sly and Unseen, The Doomed Birds of Providence) and Keiron Phelan (Smile Down Upon Us, State River Widening, Orla Wren) and their battery of flutes, clarinets, cellos, guitars, keyboards and drums.
'Three' continues and extends littlebow’s Impressionistic fusion of musical styles into a mood of high-brow, high-summer, high-happy, Kitsch Utopianism and renders their, already amorphous, genre classification (last journalistic ‘pit-stop’ being ‘neoclassical- minimalist/folk-jazz’) ever more intriguing.
A film, by Mark Kuykendall of the New Honey Shade, to the piece ‘Some May Transition’ can be found here:
vimeo.com/152655675
Littlebow: Three
Review quotes.
“littlebow takes seemingly simple musical patterns and makes them into something truly magical. Unclassifiable.” For The Rabbits “A stirring and refreshingly adventurous collection” Textura
“This is extraordinarily gorgeous music. One of this year’s very best albums. 9/10.” Norman Records
“Unusual and beautiful pop music. Interrogating the very idea of happiness as opposed to simply trying to evoke it. ” The Underground of Happiness
“Like a rural Faust jamming with Joanna Newsom. One of the most innovative and unclassifiable groups around” The Third Ear
“A lushly toned in mood vintage whose creative nose navigates the furrows and hedge lines of forgotten English summers” God is in the TV
“Never reached its potential in comparison with someone like Delius” NE:MM