uncan Sumpner makes music that sounds grown from centuries worth of soil filled with hunters’ campfire ashes, uneaten leeks, and okras tossed during harvests, blood spilt by swords, arrows, and muskets, and crumbled sheets of paper doused with poetry. The Sheffieldian uses little more than melodies primarily played on acoustic guitar, studio reverb and tape hiss to make that impression. His self-titled debut stands above much of what passes for “folk” these days for this effect, which is quite admirable for a CD-R demo that fell into Fat Cat’s hands three years ago.

There are a few familiar elements: the vocals are typically blanketed in group murmuring that is akin My Bloody Valentine and Crosby, Stills and Nash, melodies that pop culture describes the Renaissance with, and washes of guitar distortion are played with eyes gazing upon thy shoes. However, Sumpner’s music as Songs of Green Pheasant often submerges the imagination into a netherworld that is both of antiquity and the modern made pantheistic.

The songs seem deceptively simple at first, but when heard at times between sleeping and waking, they illustrate vivid imagery for the mind to drift through. There is also an odd, but haunting romanticism at play here with lyrics sung like an overheard conversation of lovers in a next-door apartment; whatever broken verses understood are completed and twisted by the spectator’s mind. The music reminds me of Tom Waits singing about a sleeping in the motel of an unmapped neighborhood of lost souls in Hell’s waiting room somewhere in the American wasteland. “And all they rooms they smell like diesel / And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there.”

Sumpner is at his best when his songs evaporate into the air. “The Wraith of Loving” chases a marching beat through a forest where his reverb-drenched vocals cloak the dandelion-fragile guitar melody like oak branches shattering the sunlight. By the song’s end, he comes to a clearing in the path with guitar melodies that crack through the earth and grows to the clouds. “Nightfall (For Boris P.),” is more engrossing for how Sumpner can easily be imagined walking in circles and staring at any measly object while in deep thought, just with the way he delivers his voice. Despite, some trite existential ponderings (“What is a soul? Tell me what is a soul?”), the song grows more profound when a choppy, galloping beat sets in and paves the way for searing waves of guitar drones to clarify thought. “The Burning Man” is awfully immaculate for how its melodies seemingly weave a tapestry that narrates a medieval peasant’s birth, childhood in the fields, bare survival on a battlefield, raising of a family and exhaling the last breath on a deathbed. Elsewhere, “Truth But Not Fact” lazily watches the seasons changes while waiting for a lover’s response (“In your eyes/Emptiness”).

Yet, even with all of the bliss among the ghosts in the virgin countryside, Sumpner’s album-length formula can only go so far. A few songs ease into the background and lack beauty strong enough to grab the listener’s hand; instead putting one to sleep like “Hey, Hey Wilderness” and “Until…”. Still, Sumpner proves that he can take listeners to that motel room that smells like diesel; a place where one wouldn’t want to leave.