Family Stereo – Fault Lines
Blake Watt has signed to Bella Union and announced his debut album, The Thread, out July 31. He records as Family Stereo, and “Fault Lines” is the first track from the record: folk-tinged, lushly arranged, and built around a long-distance relationship that Watt translates into images rather than narrative. Space, distance, wide open country, badlands, tunnels. The song works on implication.
Watt is 25, a former drama student and drummer who took up guitar at 15. He’s the son of Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, a lineage that surfaces not in sound so much as sensibility: a preference for understatement, for emotional precision over sentiment.
The album was recorded over nine months in north London with producer Sam Hodder-Williams, who handled string arrangements and contributed across acoustic and electric guitar, mandolin, and synths. Additional players include Pendo Masote on violin, Tom Allan on banjo, Ella Bleakley on backing vocals, and George Vaux on bass. Watt describes the intention: “I wanted to explore folk songwriting but with a kind of lush arrangement. Sam is very good at realising a sound…we wanted to throw everything in the pot but keep it kind of natural”.
What catches my ear is how much the track trusts silence and space. A falling synth figure, a pulsing rhythm underneath, and Watt’s voice doing most of the structural work. Watt on his lyric writing: “I like asking questions more than answering them. They will tell a story through snapshots rather than, you know, this happened and then that happened. I don’t like lyrics that are too literal because it doesn’t let the mind explore what they could be inferring”. For a debut album lead single, it’s a confident call to make. An album that announces itself quietly is either going to reward the attention or disappoint it. The early evidence points toward the former.
Tracklist:
- Remedy
- Waiting On Nina
- Sea Change
- Fault Lines
- The Thread
- Removed
- Collapsing
- DLR
- Silhouette On The Hill
- Three Moon Trail
- Tunnels
