Ben Howard, Noonday Dream album review: Songwriter finds stillness in exquisite new record

★★★★★

Following on from his acclaimed second record I Forget Where We Were, Ben Howard returns with his first album in four years: Noonday Dream.

Now 31, Howard has matured into one of Britain’s most talented, intriguing and unpredictable artists who, on this third album, resisted any pressure from fans or his label to put a deadline on the new release. Instead he seems to have secluded himself in spaces that inspire that natural brilliance – from southwest France to Sawmills Studio in Fowey, Cornwall – with his longtime band that feel, to the average Howard fan, more like family.

Naturally shy, at his live performances he tends to curl over his guitar and face the side of the stage, or away from the audience; engrossed in those gorgeous long stretches of instrumentation punctuated with just a few words at a time. Noonday Dream, which he produced himself with frequent collaborator Mickey Smith, captures those live shows more than any of his previous releases, with the clear, crisp touch on the piano; warm reverb on an acoustic guitar; and the snatches of conversation and click of heels on hard floors.

Howard’s music has always, above all, reflected the shifts and moods in nature, while he sings lyrics that are more poetry than traditional songs in his signature low, warm murmur. On Noonday Dream, he expands the Cornish landscape that has impacted his previous work and brings in sounds and instruments that spark the imagination for places further afield, in the most exquisite way.

Opener “Nica Libres at Dusk” is a walk in shimmering heat, dust kicked from underfoot, with Howard’s voice singing dirge-like on the verses then drawn sweetly out like smoke from the cigars on the chorus; somehow evoking the soaring eagles depicted in the lyrics through a high whine on the electric guitar. “The Defeat” features what sounds like a didgeridoo that thrums low beneath the clash of symbols and Howard’s lyrics contemplating: “Where does the robber go, where does the robber go to repent?”

Most tracks pass or hover around the five-minute mark, so “Towing the Line”, at 3.56, is one of the briefest, yet just as beautiful in the way it opens like the soundtrack of a silent film – capturing the nostalgia of a tune by composer Yann Tiersen – then fades out in a strange distortion of the song’s sprawling, Spanish-influenced guitar. On his Mercury Prize-nominated debut Every Kingdom, Howard’s voice was much lighter; now it has deepened to a low mumble, making the lyrics harder to make out, so they emerge from the instrumentation like the scraps of paper he says he wrote them on, making certain lines feel all the more poignant.

The eerie noise that opens “A Boat to an Island on the Wall” – Noonday Dream’s first single – with the hushed lap of water on wood drifts, slowly into Howard’s gentle acoustic guitar, and that whine on the electric guitar is heard again, this time like a sudden gust of wind. He and the band build and build on the instrumentation with the same quick, steady hand as a fisherman weaving a net; layering textures of guitar, vocals, violin, cello, drums, lonely calls in the background and then, halfway in, a lull interrupted by a bright synth that lifts the track to a new energy: dark and stormy as the waves around the boat; grown suddenly restless. Then on closer “Murmurations” he finds the stillness again; after the nomadic exploration through all those landscapes, there is quiet. “It’s so peaceful here, no one to fuck it up,” he sings, voice swept away by the crashing drums so the final line sounds as though he’s singing from far away: “I could see through miles, miles.”