Hollie goes lightly

It must be a hard thing to live down, this queen of New Zealand’s folk revival tag. And how to follow up a record as great as Brightly Painted One ? That 2014 album was near-perfect in its lustrous reinvention of a style made famous by doomed English minstrel Nick Drake — a haunted gothic folk that entranced and beguiled.

It’s taken four long years but Hollie Fullbrook has found a way to navigate her way forward without simply repeating herself, yet without losing what made her music so compelling in the first place.

There’s been an awful lot of touring and international attention and a few intriguing if flawed diversions, like the rather aimless EP recorded with The Clean’s Hamish Kilgour in New York. But from the first beautiful cross-picked acoustic guitar figure on the opening song — the title track, no less — of Olympic Girls, it’s clear that this is going to be special.

Rather than outright rejecting the, Fullbrook has simply expanded her musical palette with at times more ornate arrangements and instrumentation. Her voice is still perfectly plain, and all the more effective for it. In a line traced from Nico through Leonard Cohen to Nick Drake, the Cowboy Junkies and Mazzy Starr, her vocal control is a great riposte to all those awful over-emoters currently ruling the airwaves.