The Brighton artist captures a range of emotions and experiences with vivid lyricism lighting the way.

Nick Austin returns with his fourth full length album ‘Carnival’. Overflowing at the edges with fingerpicked guitar, the album teeters between storytelling and vivid description. All the while, his stunning vocals wisp and wind like silky smoke.

With a run time of just over 25 minutes, Austin’s album manages to capture a spectrum of emotions, as unsettlingly eerie as it can be serene and beautiful. ‘Suntrap’ is a fine example, its calm tone belying a certain uneasiness lurking beneath the surface. Evident in the lyrics is the idea that any ideal cannot be permanent, that even this eventually becomes unsatisfying: “In the garden’s endless day, a paradise becomes a cage.”

‘Bed Of Roses’ consists of one of the record’s more elaborate arrangements. Guitar softly plucked by calloused fingers creates a seabed of soft sand upon which murmuring keyboards sway back and forth like seaweed in the current of the song’s backing vocals. Austin’s lead vocal is gently submerged in the water, sinking towards the depths of the ocean floor as lyrics unfurl with reflections on the tragedies of war.

Austin’s gift for storytelling and rich imagery has developed as a way to express his own feelings and experiences without the need to write them in such a black and white manner. For instance, the opening track ‘Maze’ uses storytelling to express the feeling of being trapped. Discussing this song, he comments, “I’m personally not a big fan of confessional, diary-entry style writing because I feel it is overdone at the moment. I try to turn the feelings I have into stories that represent my experiences.” Explaining further, he adds, “I work in social care and support individuals who express feeling trapped by their circumstances of physical and mental ill health or a caring role for a loved one. While I would never write about someone directly, I believe these conversations fuelled this story. The ‘Maze’ is also about my own experiences of depression, the feeling of being trapped in that cycle.”

‘The Fun Of The Fayre’ is another track on ‘Carnival’ that is dominated by unease. It once again focuses on fictional storytelling to depict real life experiences of anxiety. Austin states, “The core emotion behind the story is the anxiety that you have made a wrong choice and become trapped in it. When I was in my mid 20s I left my job as a carer to work in a more corporate job; it was a terrible fit for me and I felt completely out of place. I think this song reflects some of those feelings of having lost a feeling of authenticity in your life.”

Closing the album, ‘Hawthorne Door’ is explicitly demonstrative of folk music’s capacity to facilitate a musically psychedelic strain, something suggested throughout the record. The short song ends the record with a more positive attitude focusing on escapism as it discusses two lovers looking to break away together to find some peace in an overstimulating world.