by Jowan Mead

Cold is the second single from Laura Fell’s upcoming debut album, Safe from Me, on Balloon Machine Records. It follows August’s meandering folk-rock single, Bone of Contention, and carves a delicious new notch in Fell’s portfolio. If the remainder of Safe From Me walks along the same lines as Cold, it’ll set up Fell as a truly individual musician in the South of England’s burgeoning alt-folk scene.

The track is immediate in making its eerie intention known: a creeping string section lurches alongside Fell’s arresting contralto and a patchwork monster of percussion, evoking Arthur Russell as much as it does Fiona Apple’s recent household soundscapes from Fetch the Bolt Cutters. The resultant gathering is a brilliantly baroque-tinged arrangement in the belly of a lurching ship – giving an unsettling weight to Fell’s simple request: ‘be warm to me when I am cold.’

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