The days go faster this time of year, the sudden slump into darkness and early sunsets: so far this month the city I live in has recorded almost zero hours of sunshine up until today. Autumn is definitely here, and is hurtling relentlessly to the crashing end of the calendar.

In these abrupt melancholia-inducing conditions one can’t help but make time for maudlin reflections in the long evenings and grey days as the hours stream tiresomely by. Questions arise unbidden: where am I, where am I heading, what does a fulfilling life look like? Weary introspections long since worn down to smooth nubs over the years. The flow-line comes from the same winterbourne it always has, the inexorable Spring of Thoughts tied to an anxious personality, driven by the seasons.

There’s something in the ambiguous stylings of Austin’s music that encourages the lapse into the poetical, of filling their airs and graces with the same sentimentality and resonance that they seem to convey to me. As such, it’s hard to know quite how to articulate with precision what’s found here, comprised such as it is of burbling tones and mournful drone sustains. There’s no moment of revelation, nothing that would suggest at the radical, just…evolution, movement, painterly strokes of quietly sad sound.

“fir-sweet and mossed” trickles by in bubbly synthesis at first before hollowing out into glassier tracts of quiescent drones that hang like curtains of humid air at the stream banks. Tender “fragile nowhere” seems to move in a graceful linear pathway, a point of sensitivity but placeless, abstracted, dimensionless. Likewise, “meander mapping” transports in the same idiosyncratic fluidity, making way along the same time-etched channel for another Winter of introspection.

It does crack somewhat in the final moments, with “echoing pastoral” lightening on increasing rays of blooming sunbeams and trickling mandolin pluckings, paving the wave for closing “mantled spring” that seems to exist on an ever-retreating cusp. By no means an optimistic closer, slewing into crinkling distortion as its wavefront fades out of view, nevertheless it continues to ride the mysteriously poignant and enigmatic tone the record maintains.