Review - Cahalen Morrison & Eli West, 'The Holy Coming of the Storm'

Cahalen Morrison & Eli West

THE HOLY COMING OF THE STORM

Self-released

★★★★★

The debut album of two regulars on the American bluegrass scene and one of extraordinary sensitivity

Cahalen Morrison and his powerful voice have been around on the American circuit for a while, as has his talent on the fingerstyle guitar, lap slide, mandolin and clawhammer banjo.  As has the equally multi-instrumental, equally talented Eli West.  Appearing at the same festivals, clubs and picking camps and harbouring a common appreciation of the mountain folk traditions many have seen it as merely a matter of time before the pair got together.  This album marks the arrival of a major new talent, heralded by a glowing recommendation by renowned producer, musician and Appalachian expert Dirk Powell.  ‘Cahalen and Eli’s music’, he says, ‘evokes a brotherhood of the road that transcends the relatively short time they’ve been touring together.’

His reflections on the pair praise their channelling of the natural mountain spirit into their songs, its strength and its ultimate vulnerability.  Ironic, then, that they are both from Seattle.  But, really, you don’t need to be an expert to realise that the boys have hit upon something.  What with Cahalen’s blues edge, they could be singing songs of great passion and get away with it.  But their lyrics are simple; their twelve self-penned songs are full of images of nature and a domestic life, really quite humble.  At the songs have a definite intricacy, the images placed next to each other suggestively form narratives that are odd and beguiling.  There is a sensitivity here that runs throughout their style as Cahalen’s vocals are balanced out in harmony and the pair just let the music speak for itself.  In fact, one of the early tracks of the album neatly introduces the picking into the lyrics as it takes the place of the doctor’s orders in On God’s Rocky Shore (‘I went to the doctor, and the doctor said…’).

However West is not overshadowed.  Given the lead vocals in possibly my favourite track of the album, My lover, Adorned, his voice, the softer of the two, is always there in background or in foreground.  Even here it is wonderfully gentle as it adds another layer of depth to the lyrics: ‘I’m just a man with all but a plan, with all but a plan, doin’ what any man would do.’

They are on British shores come the end of this year, digging up their family histories and doing a bit of touring on the side.  If it their investigations add more depth to their music then all the better.  If not then at least it brings this exciting bluegrass duo into UK venues. Katy Browse

www.cahalen.com

Review, Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, Walnut Creek

 

Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick

WALNUT CREEK: LIVE RECORDINGS 1989-1996

Fellside Recordings Ltd.

★★★★1/2

A piece of Folk Revivalist heritage given a bit of new life.

This year sees Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick both celebrating their 70^th birthdays and, as Paul Adams says in the cover sleeve to the album, the pair often seem to be ‘an institution, in the sense of being always familiar, always around.’  Hailing from their respective iconic bands (Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention) the two have collaborated on and off since the 60s and this album brings together a collection of more recent live recordings.

There is an obvious joy to be had in the fact that these are live.  Intuitive to each other, both take risks in performance and some of the straight instrumentals show the kind of spontaneity that has entertained audiences for years.  ‘Porcupine Rag’ is a great example, Carthy on the guitar and Swarbrick on the mandolin, each trying to catch up with each other.  And it also has a fumble at the beginning.  One of the many hallmarks of character on WALNUT CREEK.

The album’s also just a really good way to catch up with these guys; it’s neither an old record nor a ‘best of’ compilation and it benefits from this eclecticism, showing the Revivalists off properly.  There is the meaty Dominion of the Sword from their 1988 album ‘Right of Passage’, in which Carthy spits out words like tongue-twisters: ‘It'll the foster the master, plaster disaster…Ventures, enters, seeks and it centres/Ever the upper hand, never a dissenter’.  Then there is the classic Arthur McBride, carried instead by its melody and the movement of its narrative (a subversive tale of an uprising against military leaders).  And, characteristically, they will always surprise you.  Based on the role of the Olympics in South African apartheid, Carthy developed A Question of Sport over the course of three years.  He had the time to carve into it again and again and the lyrics have wonderfully frustrated and surreal qualities.

With all the fun of the real thing, this is album is a good afternoon in the making.  I can only give it the recommendation that it deserves.  Katy Browse

Review - Lady Maisery, 'Weave & Spin'

 

Lady Maisery

WEAVE & SPIN

Rootbeat Records

★★★★

A debut album from traditionalist folk trio that is charming in very many ways.

All three of the Lady Maisery girls appear on their CD sleeve, each separate from the other and in a different pose and each, in a way, representing their album.  Hazel Askew, one half of The Askew Sisters (who have already released two acclaimed albums), plays with her skirt on her tip-toes giving a sense of the trio’s playful harmonies; they are one of the first bands to try and revive the old art of ‘diddling’ that still exists in Scandinavian folk and other parts of Europe.  Clear voices plait together throughout WEAVE & SPIN and diddling appears in its undiluted form in tracks like Minoorne Labajalg (a labajalg being an Estonian flat-footed waltz) where the sheer vocal agility of the band comes out.

Yet, as in so often folklore, the innocent voices can hide something a little graver.  The girls hint to this in the punning name of their group and it runs all the way through their songs.  The Changeling’s Lullaby for instance, in minor key, uses the changeling myth, that of a fairy child left as a substitute for a baby who has been stolen by the fairies, to tell of a mothers sadness.  These tracks (the surrealist ballad Nottamun Fair is another beautiful example) are as haunting and as beautiful as the tradition from which they come.  More than worthy of the sinister stare of Hannah James (previously of Kerfufle).  This unsettling edge goes throughout the album.  Tracks like Portland Town, the traditional anti-war song, combine the girls’ playfulness with something darker and lines like ‘I lost my children, 1-2-3’.  As does My Boy Jack, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem written after his son went missing in the great war, originally put to music by Peter Bellamy in the 80s.  Like the blurb to the Changeling’s Lullaby which takes a moment to point out that the myth ‘may have been an early way of coping with infant disability or post-natal depression’, the songs have their root in real suffering and strength.

Hence the look of Rowan Rheingans standing in the middle of the album cover, a slight smile on her face but poised and with intelligence.  That’s probably how I would sum up this album.  They have immense skill between them and it lets them pull off the vocal weaves and spins of the title.  It has a real grace to it.  But it also has the depth that can only come from a real connection to tradition.  Katy Browse

Review - Peatbog Faeries, 'Dust'

 

The Peatbog Faeries

DUST

Peatbog Records

★★★1/2

An album packed full of sensitivity and activity but perhaps lacking the development that it promises.

As the soft accumulation of the first track, ‘Calgary Capars’, comes into play it is clear that this sextet from the Isle of Skye are looking to move beyond the dance rhythms that have dominated their work up until now.  DUST is their seventh album, although only the fifth in the studio, and their unique brand of purely instrumental folk is just as much about playing around on the mixing desks as it is in the recording.  Half-way between tradition and technological revelation, the result here is beautiful.  Bagpipes and fiddles, intense with that highland edge, work on synthesized beats to make an ambience worthy of Archie MacFarlene’s cover art, with its blurred photos and dust particles catching the light.  The Peatbog Faeries are at one with their country’s folklore past but try to channel it in a way that uses all of creative possibilities open to them.

Dropping some of the tight post-production bass lines has, here, brought the band some aspects of live performance that they were previously missing out on.  In ‘Calgary Capars’ the fiddle listens carefully for its synthetic tempo, tentative at first, it then becomes enthusiastic.  And then, as if its owner has run out of steam, it drops out and lets the brass section take over.  There is energy, there is thought and it’s great music.   I want to be a fly on the wall in their production process.  In all honesty, I think this album is mostly about this process, long-time producer Calum McLean claiming that it has been ‘the best musical experience of [his] life’.

And the result is interesting, no doubt.  But for this to have been a great album I would have liked the same structures that are so carefully managed within the tracks themselves (to McLean’s credit) to have found their way into the thing as whole.  It would have been poignant, for instance, to end on ‘Ascent of Conival’, an eerie but joyful tale of the composer championing the Sutherland mountain of the song’s title.  Instead we are taken back into the relaxed piano and sax of ‘Fishing at Orbost’ and then called to party at ‘Room 215’.  It seems like a bit of an anti-climax.  This being said, that the band has taken such a new direction means that a climax is probably not what they intended.  For now they are content just to jam. Katy Browse

Review - The Water Tower Bucket Boys, Where The Crow Don't Fly

 

The Water Tower Bucket Boys

WHERE THE CROW DON’T FLY

Self-released

★★★★

A reflective little EP from a band obviously exploring their diffuse backgrounds and influences.  The result is a new but characteristically lively sound, a pleasure to hear.

The Water Tower Bucket Boys have been around for a good few years now, and their punchy take on folk has shared the stage with the likes of Frank Turner, Mumford and Sons and Old Crow Medicine Show.  Oregon-based, they tour incessantly (they have several UK dates coming up in August and September) and the lifestyle of a band on the road comes across in their songs, full of the restless energy of Cory Goldman’s bluegrass banjo picking.  It is a pleasure, then, to hear a group that are obviously a formidable force live sit back and relax in the studio.  Garrett Durant’s surreal, serene cover art captures the spirit perfectly; in WHERE THE CROW DON’T FLY the Bucket Boys let their softer folk roots show and flex the full range of their musicianship, harmonies emerging tenderly from beneath their usual energy.

Nowhere is this more true than in the first and last songs on the CD, the titular  ‘Meet Me Where the Crow Don’t Fly’ and the intimate ‘R Song’ which ends with a stand alone lyric ‘Don’t forget to move slow, dear’.  In between there is plenty of charm to be had.  A guest harmonica joins Josh Rabie’s fiddle in the melodic ‘Pilgrim Song’ and Goldman’s vocals, always tinged with rock, are broken by some impressive picking solos in ‘Easy Way Out’.  Overall though, it is their opening and closing tracks that do it for me.  These are full of depth and colour, whilst lyrics like ‘leaves sound like toast’ keep the hard sense of fun that makes these guys stand out from the crowd.  I will definitely be picking up their current album ‘Sole Kitchen’ and I can’t wait to see where their professed desire to ‘turn [their] genre upside down’ will take them from here. Katy Browse

www.watertowerbucketboys.com