While Esther Swift, the pedal harpist and composer, has captivated audiences with her live performances and arrangements, this debut album sees her stepping out from behind the soundbox as a multi-pronged artist. Within Expectations Of A Lifetime’s 12 tracks, Swift sings, composes and plays her way through folk songs, ballads and some surprising up-tempo numbers, joined by marvellous musicians, including Fergus McCreadie on piano and the all-female quartet Vulva Volce on strings. 

‘Opening’ gently eases us in with ambient birdsong, strings and picked guitar before a gaggle of other instruments join Swift’s stacked vocal harmonies. ‘Just run away with me, let’s get out of the city,’ she pleads as a bagpipe and military snare drum burst in, bringing with them a sense of urgency that returns later in the album. Before then we’re treated to Swift’s leaping falsetto in ‘Blue’, a richly orchestrated dreamscape of a song, followed by ‘Lateral Flow’, a hopeful tune of solidarity written during lockdowns. 

Alongside nature and community, womanhood and familial structures are recurring themes. ‘Problems To Sharpen The Young’ and ‘The First Blast To Awaken Women Degenerate’ both take large extracts from poems by Rachel McCrum and place music around the words in an often theatrical fashion, introducing more percussion and brass sounds to add further texture and drama. ‘Vessels’ sees Swift briefly recount an experience of miscarriage and the complex emotional turmoil that followed; the pain and loss but also a relief. ‘Pain and joy can be held in one house without shame,’ she says, over building strings, before a handful of final glissandos played on her harp seem to partially rinse away the anguish.

In the more jazzy, up-tempo ‘Work And Play’, Swift seems to poke fun at Rishi Sunak’s advice for creatives to ‘retrain’ during lockdown. ‘I work to play / I have no plans to retrain / I don’t get existential dread everyday,’ she sings over frantic strings and syncopated drums. A racing piano solo and rallying pipes lead into an increasingly knotty instrumental before a final raucous chorus offers a grand catharsis. 

Swift constantly mixes the sonically harsh and soft to create compositions that sound almost rickety in nature, as if any moment they could simply fall apart. Her eclectic and sometimes conflicting methodologies, from the cinematic nature of classical music and the improvised spirit of jazz, imbue themselves in this record, resulting in a frenetic energy akin to the genre-bending sounds of Björk or Kate Bush. Like those two iconic songstresses, Swift’s voice is breathy but unfaltering, occasionally reaching shrill notes that should make anyone who hears it stand to alertness. But it’s Swift’s composition skills, along with the reliable sounds of Vulva Voce’s strings and Fergus McCreadie’s piano, that keep her music firmly tethered to its listener.
Esther Swift plays Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Friday 14 June; Expectations Of A Lifetime is released by Orange Feather Records on Friday 14 June.