Birdengine - 'I Fed Thee Rabbit Water' (Drift) Released 05/02/07

Emerging, eyes blinking, from the deepest Dorset countryside is a mini album of dark and haunting folk. Birdengine, or Lawry Joseph Tilbury to his mother, recorded this album entirely on a 4-track cassette recorder and dictaphone due to a loathing for music made using computers and digital trickery. It's a technique which is well matched with his gently eerie acoustic guitar and quiet moan of a voice.

To listen to 'I Fed Thee Rabbit Water' is to float away for a while into Tilbury's imagination, to a place where dead mermaids are lamented, where  feral children grow in the woods and the moon is always shining. It's a dark place to visit, but one that draws you right in. In the first track, 'Heads Off Dogs', he sings about trying to stitch those heads back on all winter, bringing some fairly graphic images to mind and showing that the lyrical content will be far from typical.

In 'The Evil Twin' he sings about a 'fire in the aviary', bringing in the sound of real twittering birds from recorded in Dorset. It's touches like this that help him build up the atmosphere which wraps around the music: it's easy to imagine him strumming on his scratched guitar in a small room with only the recorder and some scribbled out lyrics for company. The result is both enticing and spooky as the lightly plucked melodies mix with his strange fairytales.

It's short - only seven tracks - but those are enough to make it clear that Tilbury has a talent for songwriting. What's most exciting about this release is that, recorded in pretty much as raw a form as you could imagine, it shows how much such a talent can achieve on its own, without resorting to production to help it along. Weird but wonderful, it might not be for everyone but it certainly makes for compelling listening.