For bands and singer-songwriters, 2020 was hardly the best year to release a new album.  And let’s face it, 2021 wasn’t much better.  The only hope for artists with new music was that they could somehow connect online, as reaching fans via physical touring was out of the question.  As a result, countless records were overlooked, under-noticed and sailed away, unloved.  Scott Matthews released his eighth album, the sonically ambitious New Skin, in December 2020, at the start of a winter most of us are keen to forget.  Three years later, Restless Lullabies sees the same set of songs reborn, and, in an effort to ensure that each are properly heard, they have been stripped of skin, flesh and - in some cases - their very bones, in his most exposed and intimate record to date. 

Scott Matthews is one of those artists I just can’t imagine not being there.  His solemn, haunting vocal style has been winning over fans ever since his acclaimed debut, Passing Stranger, was released in 2006.  Back then, amid the acoustic singer-songwriter boom of the 2000s, there emerged a handful of acts that may no longer make huge commercial waves but still continue to make exquisite, interesting records.  New releases from the likes of Polly Paulusma, Tom Baxter and Tom McRae - all contemporaries of Matthews - are a comforting reminder that great songwriters can and do endure, regardless of time or fashion.  A new album from Scott Matthews (or any of the above) is the sort of thing that, even before I hear it, helps to restore my ailing faith in humanity.