Viarosa frontman Richard Neuberg returns from years of chronic illness with The Vine, a stormy yet delicate solo album with shades of Nick Drake, Sufjan Stevens and Scott Walker. 

Comparisons to the great heroes of darkly forbidding Americana flew thick and fast around Viarosa: ‘outstanding’, as Uncut put it, ‘like The Birthday Party doing Johnny Cash.’ Yet apt as those parallels may have been, they also seemed to fall a little short. 

For all the mandolins, acoustic guitars and fiddles, the music did not invoke a familiar Americana wasteland but somewhere stranger – and English. For all the gloom, as the band progressed a lightness came into the still-muscular songs, and something eloquent and nuanced into the swoop of frontman Richard Neuberg’s unmistakeable baritone. It was no coincidence that their touring-partners included idiosyncratic greats like Josh T. Pearson, Midlake and Robyn Hitchcock, or that they opened for REM in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. 

Now after a 16-year hiatus – during which Neuberg became a producer of renown before contracting a debilitating chronic fatigue-like illness – comes The Vine: the first album to bear Neuberg’s own name, and a further move into the unfamiliar, shadowed yet welcoming vista that he’s made his own.

The album is a suite of fingerpicked cat’s cradles, intimate yet epic, candid yet mysterious. Throughout, Neuberg alternates between nylon-string and electric guitar accompanied by powerfully expressive strings, brass and percussion arranged by his long-time collaborator Johnny Parry. From the glowering, fleet-of-foot opener ‘Crow Needs the Pine’ through the epic swell of ‘Weed Out the Vine’ to the tender optimism of ‘Everything Dark is Light’, these are songs only Neuberg could have written or performed. 

If The Independent heard in Viarosa ‘the sound of revenge’, Neuberg’s new songs are the sound of dark reconciliations, of uneasy joy, of light and shade – and of a well-loved artist taking a big step into the future.