Lamplight's 'Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften' Is a Tenderly Stubborn Masterpiece of Indie-Folk
The Sonic Breakdown
Lamplight is the project of Ian Williams, a Brooklyn and Roanoke musician whose self-titled debut arrived in 2024. Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften is the follow-up, thirteen tracks on Western Vinyl, and Stereogum’s shorthand for it — “drowsy but propulsive indie-folk” — is hard to improve on.
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Soft-edged and patient. Nothing here is in a hurry to establish itself; the low end functions as weight rather than drive, which is what keeps songs like “Meadow ’gain” and “Portal To August” from tipping into momentum they don’t want.
The Spatial Dynamics: The album’s governing trick is scale. Williams lets the long middle — “Speak To Us Of Love,” “Last Room,” “Altar,” “House Party” — spread out, then compresses everything into “Ring Stains,” a closer that doesn’t quite reach two minutes. An alternate version, “Clover (Slow),” exists from the same sessions, which tells you how much time he spent deciding how fast any of this should go.
Standout Performance
Williams as a lyricist, on “Speak To Us Of Love,” which he drew from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. He explained the pull of it to Various Small Flames: “That book speaks about love like an actor, more than something that can be given, taken, broken, lost.”
Why It’s Certified
⚡ Various Small Flames: “Lamplight is here to speak of love and we’d all do well to listen. Lost he might be, but aren’t we all? The important thing is that he’s trying.”
🌈 The same review on the finale: “The mood culminates in the near-triumphant closer ‘Ring Stains’, song which doesn’t quite reach two minutes in length yet contains the multitude of emotions which precede it.”
🌈 Thirteen songs that trust you to meet them halfway.