When: 7.30pm on Monday 15 May 2023
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

PLEASE NOTE: Due to exceptional demand, this show has been upgraded to Gullivers, across the road. All other details are the same and original tickets remain valid.

We’re delighted to welcome Lael Neale back to Manchester!

Lael Neale still has a flip phone and there were no screens involved in the creation of her new record Star Eaters Delight. The album is her second for Sub Pop and reveals an expansion of her sonic collaboration with producer and accompanist Guy Blakeslee.

In April of 2020, in the wake of transformations both personal and global, Lael moved from Los Angeles back to her family’s farm in rural Virginia. Looking at the world from a distance and getting in tune with her own rhythms, she wrote and recorded steadily for two dreamlike years, driven by a need to make order out of chaos. Forged in isolation, Star Eaters Delight is a vehicle for returning, not just to civilisation, but to celebration.

She says: ‘Acquainted with Night, recorded in 2019 and released in 2021, was a focusing inward amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me. It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound. This album is more external. It is a reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again.’

Album opener and lead single I Am The River melts the ice with a dynamic explosion of minimalist transcendental pop clearly descended from the Velvets branch of modern music’s family tree.

‘Lael is always telling me to play fewer notes,’ says Blakeslee, whose spare yet cinematic arrangements create an ambient space in which Neale’s clear and unaffected voice can explore familiar themes in an unexpected way. Subtle but potent references to Shakespeare, Emerson and the Bible (which she hasn’t read) swirl together with deeply personal musings and touches of wry humour, always more optimistic than cynical.

‘I like to use archetypal language because I want to get a rise out of people. I want to trigger a response. A single archetypal word carries more weight and punch than an ordinary word. Jesus means more to us than Joe,’ she notes.

Album centrepiece In Verona is a sprawling gospel dirge in which the narrator-as-newscaster chants hypnotic incantations to lament a society plagued by divisions and hypocrisies, reimagining the Montagues and Capulets without mentioning them by name and cautioning the listener to ‘cast no stone’.

Lael continues, ‘The past few years have seen more mud slinging and finger pointing than I’ve witnessed in my life. When I found myself getting drawn into the fray, this phrase became a mantra helping me seek higher ground and a broader perspective.’

Faster Than The Medicine gallops across a misty imagined English countryside, frenetically propelled by the drum machine built into Neale’s signature Omnichord, while the bittersweet Must Be Tears invokes Nico with its pulsing Mellotron strings.

While this is a record about polarities – country vs. city, humanity vs. technology, solitude vs. relationship – the deeper intention is to heal; to come to terms with our differences and put the broken pieces back together again. Lael’s affinity with the Transcendentalists has to do with her quest to hold onto sovereignty over her own mind. In a time when our devices are constantly flooding us with information, opinions and propaganda, Lael is intentional about what she takes in – hence the flip phone and the cassette recorder.

She claims to be a minimalist ‘not because I don’t like things, but because I value freedom more’.

Star Eaters Delight is released on Sub Pop Records on 21 April 2023.

Tour support comes from Guy Blakeslee. When Guy Blakeslee regained consciousness in a Los Angeles hospital on March 14 2020 he awakened into a world much changed. The night before, he had been struck by a car as he walked across the street. While he was unconscious the world had gone into lockdown. He soon found that his brain had changed too. When he sat at the piano a few days later he was amazed at his newfound understanding of the relationship between his hands, the notes and the keys.

This began a journey of healing through music and a whole new sonic approach for the veteran underground musician. Best known as ‘Entrance’, the guitar wielding frontman of Los Angeles psych legends The Entrance Band, and as a wild-eyed troubadour on solo records like 2021’s Postcards From The Edge, Blakeslee has spent the past three years immersed in making four track recordings of wordless compositions and improvisations (as heard on 2021’s Double Vision), and has just released a vast library of this impressionistic work, a double-cassette box entitled EXTRAVISION – via his new imprint Third Eye Memories.

Healing music, New Age music, ambient soundscapes, Satie on acid, music for psychedelic therapy, extraterrestrial film scores… call it what you will; Blakeslee considers it ‘channeled material’ sent through him from other, parallel dimensions.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are also available from Dice.fm, WeGotTickets.com, Ticketline.co.uk and on 0871 220 0260.

Attend on: Facebook