DM Stith: Pigeonheart review – brilliantly compelling

DM Stith’s second album arrives seven years after his excellent debut, and though there have been stints in Sufjan Stevens’s live band and collaborations with others, it’s easy to imagine this record swallowing up much of that time. A dizzying range of sounds and ideas are compressed within its 12 tracks, and its lyrics suggest a painstaking process of self-exploration. If that sounds heavy-going, in a way it is: Rooster is full of clatter and distortion; War Machine has the strained intensity of solo Thom Yorke. But Stith creates musical friction in a way that’s brilliantly compelling, and there are passages of calm here too. Summer Madness, in particular, shimmers with impressionistic beauty.