Aspidistrafly– singer-songwriter April Lee and producer Ricks Ang – traffics in a lush tranquility, attuned to the ever-changing movement of age and landscape. A Little Fable, released a decade ago, found a second life via fashionable fairies on TikTok, but now the Singapore-based duo returns to deepen its abstract, pastoral beauty with Altar of Dreams (out Feb. 25). In its gauzy-yet-glossy arrangement of flute, strings, clarinet, saxophone and piano, "The Voice of Flowers" feels less like the wispy Vashti Bunyan influence of Aspidistrafly's past, approaching something more like an ambient Adele ballad ornamented by environmental field recordings. Lee doesn't belt out her romantic sorrow here, but hangs it in the chasm of her lower register, to survey "the furthest crevices of the earth / We voyaged through death and birth."
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