ALBUM REVIEW: Sally Anne Morgan – Thread

Thrill Jockey

Released: 21.08.20

On her debut solo album recorded across Virginia and Georgia, US multi-instrumentalist and visual artist Sally Anne Morgan (Black Twig Pickers, House and Land) brings together odd ends, overheard stories, personal and borrowed memories. Drawing from traditional Appalachian music and experimental folk, Thread decidedly belongs to a time before time.

Morgan’s frail (yet resolute) voice meanders over bright fields of fiddle, piano, guitar and banjo. Though Thread feels mostly light-hearted, there are intimations of gloom too, as on the softly desolate Wintersong. Morgan’s personal, stumbling songs of experience have the quality of archetypes; they offer us a reduction of life to its rawest elements (seasons, colours, tones, sensations), conjuring up places we knew – and inexplicably forgot – long ago.