Free and legal MP3 from Blue Roses (brisk acoustic/electronic blend from a young British singer/songwriter)

"I Am Leaving" - Blue Roses
     So-called folktronica often seeks to blend the acoustic and the electronic, but typically in a moody, glitchy ambiance; what Laura Groves introduces us to with "I Am Leaving"--Blue Roses is the name the multi-instrumentalist Groves uses for recording--is an acoustic/electronic blend that is at once bright and dreamy, the brisk folky guitar almost but not quite overwhelmed by a glistening synth that sounds like what a harpsichord might sound like if it could sustain. Soon we hear her harmonizing wordlessly, swoopingly, with herself; the (beguiling) effect is Kate Bush doing an imitation of the Roches, if you'll excuse the old-school references. When she first begins to sing actual words (at 0:40), her unadorned singing voice seems almost too...I don't know, too something: too raw, too high, too present and unfiltered. But give it a little time, and when the harmonies return, wow, check out some of those intervals--I can't even begin to guess what notes she's putting together at 0:59, on the second syllable of "silent." My goodness.
     I'll tell you exactly where it all began to make sense to me: at 1:12, when the swooping, wordless harmonies come back once more, and the melody makes that gratifying descent through an octave (first as she sings "Oh give me a clue somehow"). She repeats it, then resolves it with one extra melody line, then we go back into the verse--and we never hear this section again. But its existence haunts the song, renders it deeper and more complex. Everything sounds different from here on in, and not only because of the shift in instrumentation.
     "I Am Leaving" is from the debut, eponymous Blue Roses album, which was released in April in the U.K. and is scheduled for a July release on Beggars Banquet Records in the U.S. MP3 via the Beggars Group web site.