Where the World is Thin

Kris Drever’s solo albums don’t come that often – 2010’s Mark the Hard Earth was followed six years later by the excellent If Wishes Were Horses, and while Where the World is Thin actually dates back to 2017, when he wrote ‘Scapa Flow 1919’, about the sinking of the German fleet, a new Lau album and a move from Shetland to Glasgow meant that further solo work was pushed back until the beginning of this year, when he got down all but two of the album’s songs. And then, of course, everything changed. Those final two songs, the elegiac ‘Sanday’ with its evocation of Orkney, and the lockdown song, ‘Hunker Down’, were developed and finished remotely, with the likes of John McCusker, Siobhan Miller and Phil Cunningham sending in their parts.

The title-track is a meditation on creativity, immortality, the thin places where life meets death and time meets what survives time, while the story of von Reuter’s scuttling of his own fleet in ‘Scapa Flow 1919’ is a concise history-cum-seafaring ballad told from the point of view of one of the nameless crew. Drever is in fine voice throughout, warm and elegiac, with plenty of light and shade in the musical settings, together making for a strong addition to his catalogue.