Orlando Weeks - A Quickening (LP)

Orlando Weeks has always had a gift for singing in the margins. With The Maccabees he made anxious beauty feel widescreen, but A Quickening, released in June 2020 on Play It Again Sam, scales everything down to a room where the volume is low, the curtains are moving just a little, and life is about to change. It’s his first proper solo album and it circles one topic with care and curiosity: impending fatherhood. That focus gives the record a quiet charge. Even when the arrangements bloom, they never grandstand. The songs feel like notes jotted in a dim notebook, then coloured in later with brass, hushed synths and patient percussion.

The opening stretch sets the tone. Weeks sings as if he’s sitting at the edge of the bed, watching things take shape and trying to find the right words for hope, fear and tenderness. Blood Sugar is a standout, all pulsing rhythm and clipped phrasing, like a mind looping on one anxious thought that somehow turns into a melody you don’t forget. Milk Breath is the other obvious entry point, a lullaby that doesn’t sentimentalise the subject. He leans into small images rather than big declarations, which suits his voice perfectly. There’s fragility in his delivery, but it’s never flimsy. He sounds steady in his uncertainty, which is an oddly comforting combination.

You can hear him trusting space. Where many records about family go maximal or maudlin, A Quickening rests in the grey areas. The brass lines peal like distant street music drifting through a half-open window. Guitars and keys move in soft circles. When drums arrive, they serve the song rather than jolt it. Weeks has talked in interviews about writing through pregnancy and the lead-up to birth, and the record holds that suspended time. The title is a neat touch too, loaded with the old meaning of first movement in the womb and the new meaning of life speedily gathering pace.

If you followed The Maccabees through the Mercury Prize-nominated Given to the Wild era, the craft here won’t surprise you, but the palette might. The punchy indie architecture is mostly gone, replaced by textures you feel more than clock. It’s closer to the contemplative headspace of his 2017 storytelling project The Gritterman, though A Quickening is less about characters and more about presence. There’s a painterly quality to the way he layers horns and keys, and he’s smart enough to get out of his own way when a melody needs air.

St Thomas, named for the London hospital, lands like a diary page you’re almost afraid to read back. It doesn’t try to be the definitive statement on parenthood. It just captures the fluorescent hush of medical spaces and the tiny rituals that suddenly feel monumental. That’s the thread running across the album. Nothing is forced into an anthem. Even the catchier choruses feel like they’ve grown naturally out of observation and repetition.

The record found an appreciative audience among critics on release, with coverage across The Guardian, NME and The Line of Best Fit, and it’s easy to hear why. It’s understated without fading into the wallpaper. You lean in because the songs reward attention, not because they demand it. On vinyl, that intimacy gets a little extra warmth. A Quickening vinyl pressing turns the quiet corners of these tracks into living-room moments, the horn harmonies blooming at low volume, the vocal stacked just-so in the centre. If you’re crate-digging for Orlando Weeks vinyl, this is the one that tells you who he is now, not just who he was with the band.

There’s also something universal in how he writes about not knowing. Plenty of albums try to explain life’s big shifts. This one listens to them. You can hear the early-morning calm, the restless evening pacing, the way a single phrase becomes a talisman. It’s not a cosy record exactly, but it is deeply humane. That makes it easy to recommend to anyone who grew up with The Maccabees, to fans of low-lit singer-songwriter records, or to someone browsing a Melbourne record store looking for something to play late on a Sunday.

If you want to buy Orlando Weeks records online, A Quickening is a gentle place to start, and it sits neatly alongside other Orlando Weeks albums on vinyl for a quiet-night stack. For those building collections in vinyl records Australia circles, it’s the sort of release that gets passed on by word of mouth, then becomes a personal favourite. Not because it shouts its case, but because it keeps you company, patiently, while life takes its next step.