COUNTLESS BRANCHES | BILL FAY

Stephen M Deusner at Pitchfork writes: After his first two albums sold next to nothing and his music career sputtered out in the early 1970s, Bill Fay settled into what you might call a normal life. He worked as a groundskeeper for a London park, then as a fish packer in a supermarket, all the while raising his children. He never tried to launch a comeback, but he did keep writing and recording songs with a keyboard and a small 8-track. Between Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, his unreleased studio album from the late ’70s, and Life Is People, his comeback album in 2012, Fay wrote hundreds if not thousands of spare hymns about the world around him and his place in it, with no other audience in mind beyond himself. “I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life,” he told the New York Times recently, “finding songs in the corner of the room.”

Countless Branches, his third album since being coaxed back into releasing music, hints at what those unreleased recordings might sound like. Compared to Life Is People and 2015’s Who Is the Sender?, both of which fleshed out his songs with folk-rock accompaniment, this album adds so little that when a simple timekeeping beat arrives on “Your Little Face,” it feels almost deafening. . . .