A quality album with seemingly everything overdone. Too often does the album instill this sense of direness which is only made worse by the plethora of unnecessary layers of strings. The album isn't bad but it is very far from what Drake was meant to have been making.

Enter this album, and you will be welcomed in a field of flowers, trees and rivers. The loneliest night would come, and go, and in the end, alone still, you will feel happy and calm. One of mine favorite folk albums of all time.

My favourite Nick Drake album, every song is brilliantly written and a story for itself. It's somewhere in between the grandiose Bryter Layter and the instrumentally minimalistic Pink Moon, and combines the best of both if you ask me.

Everyone talks about Pink Moon (deservedly so) but this one deserves praise also.

Do I love Nick Drake? Yes. Do I think Five Leaves Left is a good and borderline great album? Uh-huh. Do I feel its substantially inferior to his other 2 albums (Bryter Layter and Pink Moon)? Yessirdoodle. Do I feel the mood of Five Leaves Left is way way too overlarded with over the top orchestration and dour and slow tempos? Yes. Are the songs and the lyrics and the guitar playing on Five leaves Left still fab in my opinion? You betcha!

Okay, so enough of that. Now some thoughts: I really like Five Leaves Left, the opener, River Man, Three Hours, Saturday Sun etc, are all gems. The deep, almost inconceivable(!) melancholy of the record is stunning and unique.

But again the production almost insists upon itself too much. Family Guy ref stolen from another diary regular here. But it fits. The orchestration and the slow, deliberate delivery of a 19 or 20 year old nick Drake, make this album AT TIMES a bit tedius to me. The highs are quite high, but not nearly as high as the highs on his next 2 albums. And the lows are so much lower than those 2 albums.

Rating: 8.5/10

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This record is somehow both epic, and empty. It's so frail and thin, but also so large. It's really a paradox of music. Nevertheless, really very pretty, the way his voice contrasts the guitar throughout is breathtaking. A lot of his melodies are rather bland, but he steps up instrumentally by mixing in tons of diferent stringed and percussion instruments to keep it interesting. I plan on coming back around to this album very soon.

A beautifully haunting album from Nick Drake. Five leaves left, is basically perfect, every song is a mini masterpiece. It's atmospheric and intimate and is extremely emotive. Superb guitar work too. A true classic.

As debut albums go, there are only a handful in my opinion that are better than this, it arrived without much fuss and disappeared without any kind of chart history or even modest sales but it has certainly grown in stature over time.

Nick Drake's practically whispered vocals, his very precise lyrics, and the great guitar work, in particular on tracks like Cello Song are a delight to the senses. A lot of these tracks have a sweeping orchestral arrangement which compliments the delicate vocals, and gives the likes of River Man and The Thoughts Of Mary Jane the dream-like feel of a green English summer afternoon.

One of the best albums of all time.