Gilmore is an exceptionally gifted songwriter and an outstanding performer with a beautiful voice and a wonderful way of putting a song across. This collection is restrained and thoughtful, as you’d expect in this context, but with a genuine power and also real beauty and yearning in tracks like the fabulous Vespering. Her superb ability with words is undiminished and is at its most powerful in the opening and closing tracks, both spoken over music. They are quite outstanding in their content and delivery and have important, intelligent, beautifully expressed things to say about the insidious indoctrination of passivity in girls in Of All The Violence I Have Known and of resurgence, resilience and hope in Last.
Thea Gilmore – now called Afterlight – is one of our very best, I think and deserves to be far better known. This isn’t the sort of album which is likely to draw in lots of new fans (although it deserves to) but it’s a bit of true class, I think. I would warmly recommend Afterlight to anyone who appreciates an intelligent, melodic and thoughtful song.
