Naima Bock’s Below a Massive Dark Land is an expansive return

Much like her 2022 debut Giant Palm, the album is rich in ingenious details and guided by her thoughtful, mournful singing. At the same time, this collection feels a little more spontaneous in parts, at times losing its incisive power but more often than not showing her gift for evolving compelling musical ideas across the span of a track.

Having parted ways with Goat Girl after the release of their first album, Bock went on to immerse herself in softer styles of folk and alternative music, working on solo material and joining Broadside Hacks while also pursuing an archaeology degree and work as a gardener. Giant Palm felt like a brilliant completion of her artistic transformation, a dialogue between her songwriting, the careful arrangements of producer Joel Burton and contributions from members of groups such as caroline and Shovel Dance Collective. Though Below was mainly written solo, it is worth noting the colouring added by co-producers Jack Ogborne (aka Bingo Fury) and Joe Jones and Oliver Hamilton of caroline and Shovel Dance Collective, who contributed arrangements.

There is a melancholic, reflective quality that runs throughout this album, recurrent language suggesting the processing of a breakup accentuated by Bock’s striking, wide-ranging vocals. Opener “Gentle” tells of a love that came when “the time was not right”, its propulsive rhythm like a dripping tap suggesting the sad insistence of the passage of time. Of ‘Further Away’, Bock herself has explained rather charmingly that it was “written in Greece whilst trying to learn mini bouzouki and missing someone”. “Feed My Release”, meanwhile, becomes wrapped around the phrasings like, “You’re the one I think about / You’re the one I wrote about and lost / You’re the one I worked it out”, which play out differently across Bock’s shifting voicings, which with each turn accumulate new meanings.

Most tracks on this album feel like beautiful meandering experiments, the payoff coming in the conclusions they reach. The openings are not necessarily so gripping, tending to consist of lyrics casting about for meaning among ideas that gradually distil into more definite refrains. A weakness of a few tracks, particularly ‘Further Away’ and ‘Takes One’, is this rambling quality, which privileges impulse and personal meaning over more universally poetic lyricism. However, on most tracks this process seems to be the touchpaper that sets alight musical possibilities including the more memorable lyrical hooks, as is certainly the case with the epic build in “Takes One” around the (albeit still lyrically simple) refrain, “Some day you’ll find another one”.

The refrain of “My Sweet Body” forms another such example of the music deepening the power of the lyrics. The word choices, “My sweet body crumbles so endlessly” and “My sweet body crumbles so carefully” (my emphases) do not quite inspire that mystified inspiration for the listener, but this section and its repetitious phrasing gives rise to a beautifully interweaving flurry of melodies across violins, mandolins and, finally, a tensely crackling electric guitar. The album is full of such moments where the confluence of sounds brings about some magical plateau. We hear a similar serenity in the woodwind symphony behind “Gentle” and the choral stirrings of “Feed My Release”. Even “Moving”, a relatively simple song, is sharpened by the most minimal changes, like the guitar strums that are subtly introduced to punctuate the second verse, the growing violin drones and, finally, the trumpet melody that plays the song out.

“Kaley”, the song that announced the album, is perhaps the most obvious deviation from this form on this album. Upon release, this track felt like a deliberate (and ultimately rewarding) exploration of the noisier territory that this project could incorporate. It is led by a bombastic horn and guitar riff, dabbling in the hairiness of 60s pop before a contrastingly soft verse. Though still packed with interesting shifts in tone and musical colouring, this track feels as close to a hit as we have heard on either of Bock’s solo records.

Below is an assured followup to debut Giant Palm, pushed to excellence by sensitive arrangements that build raw, personal lyrics into climaxes where every emotional nuance can be intimately shared by the listener. The album’s strength is drawn largely from these expansive arrangements, which make use of sparsity and density with equal power. No track is without its flash of inspiration, even down to the brief epilogue “Star” with its delicately interacting pair of vocals. As such, the album builds on the disparate strands of Giant Palm and feels just that bit more whole in its final form.