Alternating eerie ambient interludes and bucolic indie-folk pop, the debut from Mirrored Daughters dwells in the spaces between London’s urban sprawl and the ancient trees of Epping Forest. Indeed, the album’s wordless opening and closing tracks are built around the sound of bells and an old violin being physically dragged through the woods, conjuring images of some strange faerie processional happening out of sight on the city’s edgelands.
Mirrored Daughters is a supergroup of sorts, a remote recording project by members of London bands The Leaf Library and Firestations, cellist Hannah Reeves, and singer Marlody. There’s an easy kinship between these players – most of whom have been involved with each other’s projects over the years – that makes for a warm and welcoming listen despite the record’s occasional moments of unease.
‘City Song’ is a soft focus folk song, with Lewis Young’s gentle acoustic guitar consoling a world-weary Marlody as she dreams of escaping an overbearing city to “leave the sound / and your heavy head behind”. It’s followed by the more upbeat ‘The New Design’, which contrasts typically suburban imagery (“Still life, the park and ride”) with a rural landscape where “trees break the pale sky”. Despite this calm, however, the seasons are out of whack and there’s a foreboding to Mirrored Daughters’ Arcadian landscapes. It would be a stretch to call this an album about climate change – the lyrics are, for the most part, pretty abstract – but the sense of a troubled environment is present throughout.
Elsewhere, ‘An Open Door’ has a sundappled ’60s-ish soft psych lull, reminiscent of Wendy and Bonnie or The Millennium, while ‘Unreturning Sun’ hints, perhaps, at an escape from some constricting relationship. Not for the first or last time on the album Reeves’ cello lends a subtle grandeur to the song, its widescreen dreaminess unexpectedly reminiscent of Beck’s Sea Change.
While the vocal tracks are the album’s most immediately rewarding, more than half of Mirrored Daughters is instrumental. ‘The Ambresbury Daughter’ (a reference to Ambresbury Banks, the remains of an Iron Age hill fort located in Epping Forest) creaks and groans with what sounds like an aged harmonium while more of those bells clatter and ring in the distance. ‘Something Hollow’ and ‘The Lanthorn Daughter’ add pulsing synth lines and recall the calmer moments on The Leaf Library’s dissonant collaboration with Teruyuki Kurihara, Melody Tomb, while the sun-bleached warble of ‘Decrowned’ edges towards folktronica.
Finally, ‘Mirror Ascend’ brings the record full circle. This time, however, the ominous drones have been replaced with a simple guitar melody and distant peals of saxophone. It’s a moment of unabashed beauty that feels like clouds parting after a storm. By the end of this evocatively autumnal album, Mirrored Daughters have wandered deep into the forest, but are finally out of the woods.
