Dark Sky Reserve

With her second album, Dark Sky Reserve, Dutch musician Robin Kester continues to explore the gloomy, mysterious atmospheres she fortified on 2023s Honeycomb Shades. That album saw her adding vintage organs and keys, woodwinds, and various other instruments (vibraphone, autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, and more) to a core palette of guitars, modular synths, bass, and drums that she had established on earlier short-form releases. The album was recorded with producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding) in Bristol, England -- her first time tracking outside of the Netherlands -- and a handful of similarly celestial-minded musicians, such as Portisheads Adrian Utley and This Is the Kit affiliate Rozi Plain. The idea of exploring is an apt one for a track list with titles like "Departure," "Tree-Lined Lanes," and "Talybont-on-Usk," a minimalist album-centerpiece based on when Kester happened upon an eerie and beautiful reservoir during a drive to Wales, an event that helped spark creativity at a time when she was struggling to finish the album. The song begins with an elongated, ghostly electronic sigh before fingerstyle guitar, harpsichord, and whispery, quivering vocals help set the creepy scene, along with lyrics like, "I want to see everything/But you are ahead me/Keeping me in the dark." A mix of electronic and acoustic textures, including strings, piano, saxophone, and Theremin-like spectral sounds eventually add more tension to the quiet drama. More-beat-oriented entries like the driving "Happy Sad (Its a Party)," the trip-hop-inflected "Perspective," and the synth poppy "Departure" may be catchier and a little less filmic, but vulnerable vocals and an uncanny sensibility permeate Dark Sky Reserve. Its a mood that, if anything, Kester digs deeper into on the closer, "Something Is Moving." It opens with a pulsing tone, quietly ominous strings, and the lyrics, "Stay still/Something is moving/And I know its not us" -- they dare not budge throughout the song. Having a dramatic effect with what are actually quite subtle arrangements, Dark Sky Reserve is a feat of elegant, Twin Peaks-ian foreboding that, like the reservoir at Talybont-on-Usk, reveals substantial beauty as well. ~ Marcy Donelson