Hilary Woods's new album, Birthmarks, is available via Sacred Bones Records. According to the PR blurb the album is "inspired and informed by ideas of inner transmutation in the face of anxiety, post-war Japanese and wet-plate photography, early music, the secret life of trees, wolves, drone, the drawings of Francis Bacon, the images of Francesca Woodman, the films of Chris Marker, the experimental collapse of community, and the power of the lone human voice"... Whatever that means...

Birthmarks is pretty much an experimental album... and at times it almost feels as though Hilary Woods didn't have quite enough material for a full LP and a sound engineer generously stretched everything out to pad things out.

It's pretty much a self-indulgent collection of noise that will only mean something to Woods - and I'm not overly convinced that she'll get that much out of it.

A rather bland affair which promises much and delivers very little.

5

Nick Smithson