Having just come off the back of a short run of UK festivals with each one at a suitably inventive leftfield event befitting of her mercurial talents – End of the Road, Manchester Psych, and Supersonic – Mary Lattimore is now out on the road in this country playing a series of shows at smaller independent venues.
At the festivals the Los Angeles-based composer and harpist was flying entirely solo. For these gigs she is reunited with her fellow American Walt McClements, the accordionist and multi-instrumentalist with whom she recorded the album Rain on the Road which was released earlier on this year.
The two musicians conjoin to mesmerising effect for the last song of the evening, ‘We Waited For The Bears To Leave.’ One of the five compositions that comprise Rain on the Road, here it is afforded even greater space to breathe, a gently improvised yet deeply atmospheric piece where the harp and accordion become one. It brings to a close an evening of quite beautiful serenity and reflection.
Some two hours beforehand Walt McClements – who has previously played with Hurray For The Riff Raff and Weyes Blood – repurposes his accordion as a singular symphonic instrument through a series of processed effects. He produces subtle ambient shifts, assumes the abstraction of a church organ, and the dual interplay with the muted modal jazz of his trumpet briefly transports us to the Iberian peninsula.
Like Walt McClements before her, Mary Lattimore clearly feels a deep-rooted connection with the Brudenell. She has been here before, but always opening for other acts. That she is now headlining a show “feels like a personal milestone” for her. Her great sense of pride and belonging pulses through her performance.
Lattimore opens with ‘Til A Mermaid Drags You Under’ from her 2020 album Silver Ladders, recorded at the studio of Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in Newquay, Cornwall. That she is playing this piece in the country where it was produced seems to levitate its meditative melody to an even higher plain.
And the fact that Mary Lattimore is reunited with the harp that she bought in 2014 and which ordinarily “lives in Brussels” – presumably pressed back into action whenever she is playing on this side of the Atlantic – is another factor that helps align her creative stars tonight.
‘For Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth’ was written by Mary Lattimore about the American astronaut who had once spent a total of 340 days in space on one single flight. At that same time she had fallen and broken her jaw, resulting in it having to be wired shut whilst she recovered. She draws sonic parallels between their two experiences in having to subsequently readjust to the familiarity of the worlds each had left behind. The celestial layers of her harp reflects this process of acclimatisation with a strange but compelling uncertainty, relocating the music of Mary Lattimore as it does so into another spiritual world.
Photos: Simon Godley
More photos of Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements at the Brudenell in Leeds.
