Embarrassed Landscape

Irma Vep is the on-going, evolving main vehicle for polymath musician Edwin Stevens and on Embarrassed Landscape the project has reached a zenith. Primarily recorded in Stevens’s adopted home town of Glasgow over two days with frequent collaborators Ruari Maclean and Andrew Cheetham, Embarrassed Landscape is an album that breathes in a fetid skip full of millennial dread, self-effacing anxiety and doubt before exhaling it as heartbreaking songs and ecstatic abandon. Following a series of limited releases spread out over the course of a decade, recorded in fits and starts around the United Kingdom as the protagonists wanderlust saw fit, Irma Vep’s 4th album proper presents Stevens’s vision in its fullest and most realised form. Built around the skeleton of Stevens’s songwriting and fleshed out with loose, virtuoso playing, it’s a body of work that could have been the anxious songs of an over-thinker but rendered here Embarrassed Landscape revels in a kind of un-selfconscious confidence