Saint Saviour, In The Seams – Sunday Times

Dan Cairns reviews Saint Saviour’s latest album, In the Seams, featuring Manchester Camerata, for The Sunday Times.

The sparser acoustic moments on Becky Jones’s 2011 debut, Union, provide the template for this wonderful second album. Gone are the experimental electro textures and structures; in their place come infinitely subtle arrangements from Bill Ryder-Jones, with shimmering accompaniment by the Manchester Camerata orchestra. In the Seams finds the former Groove Armada vocalist journeying back to her childhood and weighing up her regrets and unresolved issues.  The results, on tracks such as Intro (Sorry), Nobody Died and Let It Go, are startingly intimate; and, sung in Jones’s fragile but precisely enunciated voice, incredibly moving.

Saint Saviour and Bill Ryder Jones are on tour from 2 – 13 December 2014. Manchester Camerata will be joining them in Stockton (4th Dec), Manchester (6th), London (12th) and Liverpool (13th), thanks to Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts programme. You can find out more about the tour and the album on Saint Saviour’s website.