Sumie - Lost in Light

The Guardian 40

(Bella Union)

Swedish singer-songwriter Sumie Nagano (sister of Little Dragon frontwoman Yukimi) seemingly paints only in watercolour. Her second album tries to don the weeds of gothic Americana for a darker tone than the pale folk of her eponymous debut, yet remains washed out, like an overexposed negative: oddly beautiful but wilfully wan. From the Mazzy Star-lite reverbed strums and detached vocals of Fortune and the spectral saloon torch song of the mild west that is Night Rain to the soft country melancholy of Walk Away, with its faintest breath of brass, one song drifts ghostlike into another, leaving little lasting impression other than a vague, pretty sadness.