'Alela Diane might be disparaged by some as a 'worthy' artist in the negative sense. Her songs, particularly on new album Cusp are spare and unembroidered and focus on the most basic issues of existence. The sheer realisation of being alive and its transience, motherhood, family, love, hearth and home, nature, the world around us and how it inspires, informs and shapes us. It's an approach that could easily grate or irritate in the hands of an inferior artist but Diane is such a considered and talented one that the effect is actually the opposite. It's utterly inspiring. A spell cast!
Focusing in turn on migration, what it feels like carrying a child in your womb, the world seen through a babies eyes, the Syrian toddler and the image that went around the world of him washed up on a Turkish beach, Sandy Denny and her own orphaned child and elsewhere on similar, recurrent themes. Nothing seems out of place or overstated Thoughts of familial love and the dreadful imagining of loss. Very much an album on what it feels like to be a mother, on the record's sleeve Diane sits in an elegant almost Edwardian dress, her hair set in a bob, sat in profile on a kitchen chair as if for a family portrait which will adorn the wall of that self-same kitchen for the course of a lifetime before being passed down to future generations. A beautiful idea and this is a truly beautiful album that ticks like an old mantelpiece clock towards its inevitable conclusions of love and consolation.'
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