Poppy Ackroyd: Liminal – Album Review

Poppy Ackroyd: Liminal

One Little Independent

Vinyl | CD | Digital

Released 5^thJune

Adam Brady reviews the new album from Poppy Ackroyd, Liminal. Five years since her last, it reintroduces the violin as a key part of her sound, and explores how that and the piano can sing.

Poppy Ackroyd’s new album Liminal comes five years since her previous long form record, Pause. It is a long time, and things have happened. As she herself says:

In the last three years everyone I loved most in the world needed me, all at once. There has been new life and death, heartbreak and many other things that are not my stories to tell. I have also moved across the country to a part of the world I have never lived in before.

As much as these events, such as the passing of her father the artist Norman Ackroyd, could have understandably led to an album of profound sadness, Liminal is an album that is shaped but not overwhelmed.

One key reason for this is the return of Ackroyd’s violin for the first time since 2019’s Feathers. By reintroducing an instrument she has not played extensively for years, she has added – indeed, re-added – another layer to her compositions whilst, presumably, taking advantage of another cathartic avenue. The result? An album of beauty and hope shaped by the preceding half decade.

Ackroyd has never been shy of is exploring the less-than-traditional way of making music with her instruments of choice. This exploration borders on the experimental. Both piano and violin can have their strings bowed and plucked, and they can also be played percussively. As the album proudly states, “All sounds made using piano and violin”.

And what sounds they are. Shimmer does exactly that; the piano motif is minimal and playful, and if you listen carefully enough (you might need headphones or buds, as background noise will block) you can hear the beat of the pedals become a rhythm all of its own as the song progresses. Lush strings add a layer of sunshine to an already luminescent track.

Continuum, at the time of writing the latest single from the album, is dominated by the violin. Layers of strings come into play as the piano answers the call of the choral bowed instrument. For Those Who Wait begins as a more spacious affair. Piano notes are given the chance to breathe, giving the sense of taking one’s time to take stock of a situation. That changes with the introduction of the strings and beats, beats which could well have been created with a bass drum if you weren’t aware that any part of a drum kit was absent. The space is replaced by a sense of determination, a force to move towards a goal – or away from something.

Perhaps, certainly for me, the track with the most complex mix of the two instruments is The Unknown. The plain playing of the piano and violin do convey a sense of trepidation, but also the excitement one gets when facing something you’ve never seen before. The stacato beats (played on the edge of the piano?) heightening the adrenaline even just by listening – you don’t even need to be thinking of something, it just happens. That’s how affecting the track is.

Album closer Between Two Worlds is, as the title might suggest, a song of two halves. What those halves mean for Ackroyd is open to interpretation. But for me, I am certainly wearing my rose-tinted glasses when the piano is the dominant instrument. It is dreamy and safe, and there is a real sense of contentment when it is to the fore. However, when the violin comes front and centre, the dark clouds come sweeping over with each stroke of the bow. What I really like is that under the violin the piano is still there. It makes me think that just like a dream, if you concentrate hard enough you can change it and take control to bring back the dream from the nightmare. As the song draws to an end, the two instruments effectively join together to create a harmonious whole. It’s a stunning way to end a track and an album.

As much as the past five years have, for the most part, been that of upheaval it only took three months for the main themes fo the album to be developed. A short time later, the recording took place, with improvised sections being selected too. For the first time, Ackroyd also took the picture that became the album’s front cover – taken on Christmas morning from her studio window and almost certainly the inspiration for the title of the album’s opening track The Mist.

All told, Liminal is an album that shows that even if life can be disrupted and disruptive, there is beauty and light to be found wherever you look, be it within or without. Poppy Ackroyd has peered both ways and made an album in Liminal that is one to be enjoyed, listened to again, and to find things that you missed the last time.

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All words by Adam Brady, who hostsThe Adam Brady Show on Louder Than War Radio. You can find his author’s archivehere.