You are loath to say anything too slighting about Vashti Bunyan. When she released her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, in 1970, the critical indifference and hostility that greeted it so dismayed her that she promptly removed herself from the music world for the next 35 years.
In the interim, the record gained cult status, and the freak-folk movement led to her gaining an army of contemporary acolytes such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. With a mere nine-year gap between her second album, 2005’s Lookaftering, and her new offering, Heartleap, Bunyan is verging on becoming prolific by her own glacial standards.
Yet nearing 70, she remains a bashful, earnest presence live, hunched over a guitar with her accompanist, fellow guitarist Gareth Dickson. When she addresses the audience at this intimate gathering, her voice is little more than a tremulous murmur, a whisper on a distant breeze; she sings as if wary of disturbing the air around her.
Her forte is a strain of reflective, bucolic dream-folk in which nothing much happens, very prettily. A new lullaby, Across the Water, is so slight and fragile that it is scarcely there, a mere shadow of a song. She confides that Gunpowder is her autobiographical account of a troubled, dysfunctional affair, but its mellow strum and honeyed coos sound positively beatific.
Yet Bunyan proves herself a stoical trouper tonight, smiling through sound problems that emit a series of farting noises through the speakers and necessitate a long mid-set break, and when she hits her mellifluous stride, as on the encore title track from the new album, this chaste recital becomes a thing of joy and wonder. If only it had happened rather more often.
• At the Band Room, Farndale (01751 432900), on 11 October; and St Philip’s Church, Salford, on 12 October.
• This article was amended on 10 October 2014. An earlier version misnamed Gareth Dickson as Gordon Dickson, and said, in a note beneath the review added during the editing process, that Bunyan was due to appear at “St Philip’s Church, Manchester”. To clarify: St Philip’s is in Salford, Greater Manchester.
