“Nothing better than moving on,” asserts New Zealander Nadia Reid on I Come Home to You. Where her debut album reeled from Americana heartbreak, she’s girded her loins on the gutsy likes of Richard and Right on Time. And yet... “forward movement, never easy”, she notes on Preservation’s title track, with its reverbed, antipodean-gothic fingerpicking; there’s still plenty of haunted melancholy here. On the heavy, Cat Power-ish The Arrow and the Aim or the ravishing, delicate Hanson St Pt 2 (A River), that’s no bad thing, though these songs are at their best when most unexpected, as with the eerie clanks and raw guitar that erupt into the painfully spare Te Aro.
