A beguilingly simple, deliberately minimalist work. On the third album, produced by Mike Lindsay (Tunng, Lump), Douglas Dare sounds liberated and confident as never before. Known for his deeply personal approach as a singer and songwriter, in which unconditional openness and his feeling for elegant minimalism are intertwined, the Brit has long been considered one of the most sincere and exciting voices of the 21st century. While many of his previous songs were written on the piano, Dare for Milkteeth dealt with a completely new instrument: the autoharp, a kind of box zither. No sooner had he sat down with it than new song ideas literally gushed out of it - the album harbinger "Silly Games", for example, was created in less than an hour. "It was triggered by instinctive feelings... about childhood and the innocence associated with it," he reports. "And then with the autoharp everything just suddenly fitted together: I could suddenly see the whole album in front of me. " Douglas Dares' music deals with the great universal themes - love, loss, childhood - by looking at one's own experience and one's own emotional world. This is one of the reasons why his music succeeds in giving a voice, a refuge to all those who have ever felt out of place or as outsiders. Whether he sings about the abysses of the Magdalene Homes on Whelm, his coming out to his parents on Aforger or his own isolated childhood, as on Milkteeth: Dar's vision is always clear in his reduced, unique sound - his attempt to combine honesty with grace.
