BELLA1266 // 20 March 2020

Relocated from Durban to Simon’s Town, Cape Town, Wren Hinds recorded his second album in 2018. A small-town kid in a big city, he channelled his sense of displacement into a fluent range of songs, linked by a feeling for place and space.

Drawn from a poem by his uncle Keith Erasmus, the lovelorn waltz of ‘Sadness in the Wind’ is a beatific stand-out, Wren evoking Karen Dalton in his wavering, multi-tracked voice. Elsewhere, an ear for layered details and discreet tonal shifts asserts itself. On ‘Run’, a piano and a finger-picked guitar share mutually supportive space. On ‘Lights’, the guitar displays just a hint of swagger. Meanwhile, also drawing on Erasmus’s poetry, the title-track’s wonky ballroom lament sums up the album at a soothing stroke: “There’s beauty in the sadness, and there’s beauty in the pain/ And in the melancholic madness and its bittersweet refrain.” Wherever you listen, essentially.