"Fickle Game" remains rooted in Amber Run's familiar, deeply folk-influenced sound. Lead singer Joe Keogh's voice floats over a song built from scratch underneath it, beginning with the bare bones of a piano and slowly gaining vocal harmonies, percussion, and reverb-laden echoes of guitar. There's a freshness to their sound beneath the bittersweet lyrics, perhaps an indication of the freedom granted to them since parting ways with their label. Retreating to the same remote spot in Pembrokeshire that spawned the beginnings of their debut album, the band put music to one side and took the opportunity to let it all hang out before writing began in earnest. “We laughed solidly for four days, came back and started work,” Keogh explains, of the band's reinvigoration process.
“'Fickle Game' is about self-reflection in the music industry," he adds. "Being in a band can, if you let it, stop being spontaneous and easy and instead become overly political and eventually exhausting.” It's this honesty and earnestness channelled into modern circumstance that keeps Amber Run's folk sound from becoming cliché, along with their mastery of subtle yet intricate production. If the rest of For A Moment, I Was Lost is on this level, it's certainly an album worth getting excited about.
