Richard Reed Parry - Quiet River Of Dust Vol. 1

The last record that Richard Reed Parry released under his own name, 2014’s ‘Music for Heart and Breath’, was a highly conceptual classical affair that, you imagine, would not have appealed to a broad cross-section of the hundreds of thousands of people that he’s spent the past year playing to with Arcade Fire. For that reason, fans might hear of a new solo venture and assume that he’s again flexing his orchestral muscles, but in fact, ‘Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1’, the first in a two-part series that will conclude in 2019, is cut from much more traditional singer-songwriter cloth.

That isn’t to say that it isn’t born of similarly lofty ideas as his classical work; the album’s gestation began a decade ago, when Richard spent a number of weeks at a Japanese monastery, convalescing after a long run on the road with Arcade Fire, luxuriating in the silence that it offered. That explains the hushed tones that dominate ‘Quiet River of Dust’; soft, finger-picked acoustic guitars are at the centre of the instrumental palette, complemented subtly by gentle synths and the occasional, moody flicker of the electric.

The compositions, the longest of which runs nearly ten minutes, are impressionistic in their construction, and Richard’s faint vocals - pleasant if unremarkable - float in and out of the mix. The more markedly experimental moments, meanwhile, are the standouts; on ‘I Was in the World (Was the World in Me?)’, you can hear the whole fabric of the record delicately collapsing towards the end, falling into a strangely serene discordance. He’s captured both the ambience of the surroundings that inspired him and the power of the emotions that they provoked; ‘Quiet River of Dust’ won’t be for everyone, but you can’t help but marvel at its ambition.