The Impossible Wild

The Last Inklings are Leonardo MacKenzie and David Hoyland – MacKenzie is a classically trained cellist with 15 years of session work under his belt, including with Ninebarrow, Fairport and Show of Hands, while Hoyland has charted a grassroots musical career as a percussionist in jazz, blues and rock bands. Their debut album explores nature and the supernatural, as well as the nature and power of stories, superstitions and myths – with a song referencing Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces – but not without enfolding them around contemporary concerns such as mental health, well-being and environmental crises.

A brief, cello-led opening instrumental leads to ‘Hunter’s Folly’, an inversion of the hare-hunting songs of yore that focuses on the hare’s escape rather than the hunter. The mournful cello and vocal of ‘Sleeping Giant’ supports the message of awakening, while ‘Breathe Easy’ reiterates familiar apocalyptic fears surrounding the natural world and climate, while absorbing, spectral ‘The Unkindness of Ravens’ re-enters the shadowy supernatural world that overlays the strained, polluted natural one. The best songs have a charm and gravity that draw you in, and the lyrical mix of the natural and mythical opens a rich vein of feeling and thought.