After a decade of silence, broken only by a single track ‘Terra Firma’ posted on YouTube in 2018, the Wales-based, former Plummet Airlines and Brainiac 5 guitarist Richard Booth returns with Through The Door. In contrast to 2014’s memorable Spill The Moon – credited to a trio and involving a comparative plethora of musicians – this collection finds the former Plummet Airlines man on a more definitively acoustic, folky path; his sole remaining collaborator being the mandolinist Cornelius Eger.

Predominantly featuring guitar and mandolin with touches of dulcimer, melodica, and a bit of percussion these songs keep their own pace and march to their own measure. Booth is equally noted as a nature photographer and his sense of landscape and topography feel like they’ve bled into his music. The gravelly vocals seem to carry a world-weariness; his words touch familiar tropes of movement, distance, and labour, while often bearing hints of transcendence.

‘Stalybridge Mill’ initiates the sequence with more than a touch of the acoustic Dead. A work-song with perhaps a hidden sub-text, given the actual historic building is currently a dilapidated and collapsing shell. It’s almost the sole specific location invoked, though Manchester is briefly mentioned in ‘Leaving’ which song along with ‘The Needle’ and ‘Roll’ all intimately link travel and work to survival and well-being.

‘Ever The Devil’, ‘Hey’, and ‘Waste’ each skilfully employ and display repetitions; what a high-faluting rhetorician would label anaphora: “Ever the pledge the power and the glory … ever the need to steal through the night” and “What price the beauty you hold in your eye… What price the song that follows your life”. The album’s final song ‘Waste’s closing lines make for a curious benediction; “But it’s all so futile/Such an utter waste”.

Though perhaps it simply flags up one emotion among many; contrast it to the affecting ‘Plus Ca Change’ with its acceptance of transience; “quick before she slips away take her in your arms”; or the propulsive upbeat title-track where “and so we go, so we go, through the door once more” might signify a simple act or a more lasting transition.

Better left as hanging questions for while these sculpted, affecting songs may not shake worlds nor move mountains they surely touch issues of the heart.

Through The Door is available now via Richard Booth’s Bandcamp