Do people still send postcards? Do people still send a tiny, scribbled thought out to the ones they love? Do people still try to capture the feeling of a place in a handful of words?

Cole Stacey does.
Stacey is the guitarist and vocalist with the criminally underrated India Electric Co. On his debut solo album, he captures small, intimate moments but captures the places that they were recorded too. He creates snapshots that need to be treasured, need to be tied with a silken ribbon and revisited often.
Fittingly, Postcards from Lost Places is a short album, clocking in at just over thirty minutes in length, but it is also one where Stacey feels so close to you that you can almost feel his breath in your ear. As with so many of the very best contemporary folk albums, it is one that cares for the tradition but leads it in a different direction.
The first place that Stacey sends his postcards from is a Victorian clay factory in Devon. It acts as a creative space and becomes as important as the instruments themselves on Quiet Is Louder. Cricks and cracks open the track as guitars are layered through, what feels like, a vast space. There’s percussion too, at once woody and carrying the burble of water. The shimmer of an electric guitar sits next to his gorgeous voice, evoking the wide-screen romance of the very best of 80s songwriting. Think Paddy McAloon, think Robert Forster. There’s a goose-bumping tension, as stillness and silence meets a hazy realisation and darkness.
The album is split between Stacey’s own songs and those where the lyrics have come from a far older time. Hard Times (Come Again No More) [Roud 2659] may be from 1854, may have originally expressed suffering in the American Civil War but, here, it is beautiful. Recorded in St Paul’s Church, Yelverton on their Steinway it is stripped back and heartfelt. You can almost see the dust motes drifting through the stained-glass shafts of light as Stacey asks us to “pause in life’s pleasures”. He knows that life can be hard but his face is turned towards the light.
As with all the best postcards, All We Are is a bit of a collaboration, there are several voices sending the communique. The verse is adapted from a seventeenth century love poem and, BBC folk award nominee, Jack Cookson provides subtle Hammond organ and guitar flickers. It is Stacey, once again, that makes it magical. An octave mandolin picks out the tune, but the gentle layering of instruments creates a deep, warming soulful hug. There’s a pop sheen but it’s not sterile, it’s one that is so deliciously comforting that you willingly surrender to it.
The immediacy of If It Helps is simply breathtaking as Stacey pours his heart directly into your ears. It’s upbeat and toe-tapping but carries with it heartache and loss, it’s the sunny picture postcard with a devastating, handwritten message. It is this that puts it firmly into “classic pop song” territory. There are twinkles and glistens, layers upon layers. Stacey croons, hoping that we’ll see the hope in his stars.
Emilija Karaliute plays the Lithuanian kanklės – a plucked, stringed instrument of the Zither family – across several tracks on the album, each time adding elegance and breeze-blown eddies that gently coax Stacey into even greater vocal wonders. On For Old Time’s Sake, Karaliute makes those Baltic strings echo a harpsichord, so redolent of an antique world that it’s no surprise to learn that the words are from an ancient songbook and it was recorded in The Music House for Children – a suitably Victorian sounding setting. Stacey’s voice, however, is full of Buckley-esque swoops and yearnings. On Sugarcanes the Lithuanian plinks join with the faintly military beat of Russell Field’s (Midge Ure’s drummer) jazz-y drums to create a wonderful groove which Stacey, again, allows the full power of his voice to range across.
They are little thoughts for those that we love and an attempt to capture a sense of place in a few words. They are perfect postcards.
If you were to describe a classic, English postcard setting then Castles by the Sea may well be it. Stacey takes both Plymouth Castle and Henry Longfellow as inspiration, as well as a glorious soundscape fashioned by electronic ambient producer Guy Andrews, and finds great sweeps of the ocean. Sea birds and see-sawing strings scrape and crackle and that voice, that incredible voice, holds you close.
These might be short songs but they are packed with detail, suffused with love, for people and places. None more so than Feast and Fire. It has a hint of India Electric Co. about it, particularly in the chorus, but this is, assuredly, no bad thing. Written in Brentor Church on Dartmoor, his junkshop heart spilled out for all to see, Stacey is at his most romantic. Cardboard-box drums shuffle up against a Spanish Guitar and there is, yet again, this feeling of warmth, of depth, of much-loved objects held against the skin for comfort.
Both “sides” of the album finish with spoken word interludes. Both Last Supper and Lost Prayer are, simply, lovely. They are of loss and love, of finding a home and discovering lost places. They are little thoughts for those that we love and an attempt to capture a sense of place in a few words. They are perfect postcards.
In our house, the postcards we’ve been sent adorn the walls of our kitchen. They remind us of people we love, from places that they love. Cole Stacey’s Postcards from Lost Places needs to join them. It is an album that is intimate, comforting and utterly beautiful.
Postcards from Lost Places is released on 6th February available on digital, CD and vinyl from Cole’s Bandcamp page.