All

Album review

With ALL, Yann Tiersen continues the celebration of special places and the feelings they evoke that was the focus of 2014's ∞ (Infinity) and 2016's Eusa. On the former album, he explored Iceland and the Faroe Islands; on the latter, he paid tribute to his home base of Ushant, an island between Brittany and Cornwall. This time, Tiersen explores the beauty of the world around us -- and humanity's inescapable connection to it -- with results that blend ∞ (Infinity)'s epic beauty with Eusa's intimacy. ALL's creative process was a similar combination of grand and small: Tiersen recorded the majority of the album in the Eskal -- a studio, performance, and community center in Ushant -- but also incorporated field recordings from Germany, England, and California and collaborated with vocalists from Sweden and Iceland as well as his home base, most of whom sing in Breton. These diverse elements come together to reinforce the overarching emotionality of his music. The tender piano melody at the heart of "Tempelhof" is pure Tiersen, as is the bittersweet violin counterpoint of the brief but powerful "Usal Road," a piece inspired by the California road where he was chased by a mountain lion in 2014. With pieces like this one, the beautiful meditation of "Koad (Wood)" (which features Anna von Hausswolff), and the birdsong woven through nearly every track, ALL may be even more overt in its love of nature than the two albums that came before it. In the album's midsection, its interconnectedness reaches nearly mystical levels that encompass nature's radiance on "Heol (Sun)," its shadows on "Gwennilied (Swallows)," and suggest a love that conquers time and space on the ethereal "Pell (Far)." An uplifting, planet-sized embrace, ALL is another triumph for Tiersen.

© Heather Phares /TiVo