If you go to the Guinness World Records Website and type in, "Longest time between albums", you get a message that says, "Can't find what you're looking for? This site features only a selection of the 40,000 records in the Guinness World Records database."
In other words, they are saying that if one desires to know the official record for the longest time between albums, one must actually go out of the house, go to a store, buy the Guinness Book of Records, possibly with cold hard cash, come home, and read the whole thing because it doesn't have a handy "search function" button. All because of that one lazy bastard who refused to type up what the longest gap between albums actually is.
The reason why this is important is because if this album doesn't hold the record, it must be damn well close to it. 35 years after Just Another Diamond Day never quite managed to find an audience, and failure in her own time caused her to stop writing and singing music completely, Vashti Bunyan has finally come out of her enigmatic, bucolic life to produce Lookaftering.
It's a gentle folk album, just like its predecessor. Lookaftering appears simple but has layer upon layer of complexity that becomes more apparent, the further submerged in it you become. Using all acoustic instruments, and with Bunyan's whispered voice still as fragile as that of a child, Lookaftering picks up almost seamlessly from where Just Another Diamond Day left off. As if those 30 years had passed in the blink of an eye.
Where Diamond Day tells the story of a year-long journey from London to Scotland in a horsedrawn gypsy caravan, Lookaftering acquaints us with Vashti's new city life, the stresses and joys of motherhood, and the loss of her brother. Still caught up in fairytale imagination, still trapped in innocence, every song is heart-warming and incontrovertibly honest.
It seems that only in the past decade has Vashti Bunyan's contribution to British folk music become apparent. She's coming back before anyone even notices she's been away. Lookaftering is a timely reminder of where the naïve folk song came from. A slow paced album that moves surprisingly quickly. An album that doesn't look back so much on what could have been. Not on the disenchantment and rejection that was dealt to her so long ago, but her stories and life now.
Lookaftering could have been written at any time during the last 200 years or so. Such is the lack of modernity found as one journeys through the imagination, musings and reverie of an older, yet similarly countrified and ingenuous woman. Triumphantly returning after 35 years, it's finally time for Vashti Bunyan to step out of her self-imposed oracular darkness and into the approbation that, sadly, has taken so long to come. Lookaftering is, simply, a beautiful album of antiquity, nestled amongst our all too common modern comforts.
