Daniel Lee Kendall - The Point in This EP

From the NSW Central Coast comes Daniel Lee Kendall, singer-songwriter in the experimental folk mould. With his debut EP, The Point In This, Kendall marks the start of a career soaked with potential.

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The story goes that after a wine filled night out with friends, Daniel Lee Kendall returned to his Central Coast home and wrote his first song in his bedroom. Sure, that's not exactly a unique tale, and neither is the fact that he wrote and recorded it all in that very same room, but the results certainly are. Soaring finger-picked guitar lines, reverberating keys and the clicks and thumps of a drum machine fill the edges of his debut EP, all whilst Kendall's warm, breathy voice croons at the centre. 

From the moment the stilted opening bars for Lost in the Moment wash over you, you realise that you're in for something of a unique beauty. As he sings "oh, I couldn't speak my words right, every time you turned your head towards me" alongside the awkward comings and goings of strings, Kendall has mastered an ability to tell his story as much with his words as he does with his arrangements. Unfortunately, the follow-up The Point in This also lives up to its name with a beautifully sombre introduction building to include an out-of-place off-rhythm drum machine that makes you question its place in the words of the song title. That incongruous moment aside though, and the rest is all solid, relaxing stuff, the sort of tunes that could easily find their way onto a mix-tape for a future romance. From the gorgeous heartbroken ditty A Long Way to the brush drummed Kings & Queens, Daniel Lee Kendall rounds out a debut EP of uniquely haunting beauty. 

The Point In This is a fantastic debut by a special singer-songwriter. It's completely unpretentious and devoid of musical trends and fashions; it's whatever Kendall managed to put together alongside his mattress. If anything, The Point in This serves to highlight what can be achieved when you pull every step of song creation away from professional producers and engineers in tune with a process they've built over many years. It's only by doing it all himself and learning as he went that Kendall produced something this unique, and at the end of the day and EP, the results are extremely promising.

The Point in This by Daniel Lee Kendall is out now on Redcat Sounds/MGM.