8/10

Ed Prosek's full-length debut 'Redwood Cathedral' arrives after years of EPs, singles and collaborations, but there's certainly nothing tentative about it. Written around the period when he was preparing to become a father, the record looks both forwards and backwards at once, turning grief, childhood, patience, uncertainty and devotion into a deeply personal meditation on what it means to inherit a life and then begin building one for somebody else.

Recorded entirely in a 300-year-old farmhouse in Germany's Black Forest, 'Redwood Cathedral' was performed and produced by the artist himself. Throughout, he repeatedly dismantles and reconstructs these songs until the lyrics, arrangements and production all belong to the same emotional world. The result has the intimacy of a private journal but the cohesion of something far more carefully considered.

'All Things In Due Time' opens the record beautifully. Soft keys, lightly plucked guitar and airy percussion surround a song written before he knew his son had been conceived. Its thoughts on patience and waiting therefore carry an almost uncanny significance in hindsight: the song was reaching towards a future that was already beginning.

That future becomes most tangible on 'Hush Little Baby', where bright guitar and sparse instrumentation turn anticipation into tenderness. Here, he captures the vulnerability surrounding fatherhood; the awe, responsibility and strange realisation that becoming a parent can suddenly change how you understand your own.

Yet the album is just as concerned with the people and places that existed long before this new chapter.

'Rock Climber' revisits the death of an old friend who re-entered his life shortly before dying in a climbing accident in New Zealand. Against rising acoustic guitar and a breathy crescendo, the song transforms that bizarre intersection of reconnection and loss into one of the album's most affecting reflections on time.

While the title-track reaches even deeper into memory. Its "Redwood Cathedral" is a real childhood place of redwood trees behind his own Northern California home, imagined as a natural church where wishes could be made and forgiveness sought. Piano and guitar turn that memory into something almost sacred, connecting his childhood relationship with nature to his adult decision to return to rural life.

Although the record isn't really about becoming a father alone. It's about the way one enormous life change rearranges everything around it. Suddenly grief looks different, childhood becomes more vivid, your parents become easier to understand and the future suddenly feels physical.

After years spent steadily building a career, Ed Prosek has made an album exploring what's actually worth building. 'Redwood Cathedral' finds its answer not in legacy or ambition, but in the things that can still be touched, remembered, loved and eventually handed on.