A Blade Because a Blade is Whole is the latest album from London-based composer-poet-activist-improviser Alabaster DePlume, his first major work following 2022’s GOLD and 2020's To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol 1.
The 11-song album covers all of DePlume’s musical touchstones: lush and gentle instrumentals informed by ghostly ancient folk melodies; groove-focused rhythm explorations as a bed for self-searching spoken declamations; sweeping and beautiful string arrangements (in this case by Macie Stewart) set against his trademark vibrato-infused tenor sax whispermoan.
Most of all, A Blade... finds Alabaster DePlume at his most purposeful and direct yet, building on foundations laid through years of writing and touring to craft this ambitious work. Here lyrical explorations of healing, dignity, and struggle set the tone of the music itself—the mysterious and tense sensuality of the Melody Nelson-like strings on “Form a V”; the playful and idiosyncratic echoes of the 1960s British Folk scene on “Invincibility”; the golden-era Elvrum level of vocal intimacy on “Too True”—it’s all handed over with such familiarity and intention that the album’s full sonic grandness reveals itself at an IV-drip-pace.
A blade, because a blade is whole, it has forgiven itself, and because it will take a small piece of our opposite, for us to be complete. A blade has marked out these former selves on my hand, a blade made the lines that divine us and the blade is whole. A blade. While I forgive myself, and heal, and lead us in healing. We can only forgive each other once we forgive ourselves. We can only heal each other while we heal ourselves.