Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: folk

Showing posts with label folk. Show all posts

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

Corde Oblique - Cries and Whispers (2025)

Ever in search of sounds I haven't heard before, I leapt at this ninth album by Corde Oblique, one of the "main ethereal progressive neofolk bands from Italy", as Wikipedia would have it. They're a solo project for Riccardo Prencipe, who's best known for Lupercalia, but with a whole collection of guest musicians. He may well play all the guitars but I don't believe he contributes vocals, not least because the majority of the singers are female. Guests take care of all the traditional rock instrumentation, along with other folk instruments, Edo Notarloberti most notable on violin.

There are at least three sounds here.

A few of the tracks on the first half often combine the folk that's at the heart of everything this band does with heavier guitars. Whether you call it post-metal or another sub-genre, it's clearly rock based and seems entirely consistent with some of the bands they've shared stages with, like Anathema, Opeth and Moonspell. The most overt example is the midsection of The opener, The Nightingale and the Rose, which evolves from ethereal vocals over violin into a doomy grandeur, then a bouncy groove metal riff and staccato drums that are reminiscent of the panic section in Metallica's One.

The vocalist here is Rita Saviano and, while she seems to be the band's lead singer because hers is the voice we hear on the first three tracks, she's actually the most frequent vocal collaborator on this album. After those three, she vanishes for a while and the album loses part of its charm, drifting into instrumental territory. She does return, for Souvenirs d'un autre monde and Selfish Giant, but her absence is notable.

As the first half grows, it trawls in a folky prog. John Ruskin is built like a prog rock take on folk dance and it grows wonderfully, especially during a punkier second half, to the point that it feels surprising that it's a six and a half minute song. Once we're caught up in the build, time doesn't matter any more. The Father Child features plenty of prog rock and much of it is built on electric guitar wailing peacefully. A Step to Lose the Balance is more prog metal than prog rock, but it's still prog and the most consistently heavy track on the album. It even finds a Black Sabbath-like escalation towards the end.

The third sound is purer folk without any of those modern touches. Those aspects drift away as it moves into its second half and the songs turn into a purer form of neofolk. It's not entirely fair to call Christmas Carol the boundary between the two, because there are elements of this sound in the first half too, but it's absolutely a boundary. I'm sure it has value on its own merits, with the spoken word performance of actress Maddelena Crippa powerful even to someone without any understanding of Italian. There's an almost post-rock backdrop that's pleasant enough but it's a spoken word piece and it kind of helps to speak the language. So it becomes an interlude.

Ironically, given that I'm coming to this from a rock and metal perspective, I have to say that I'm all over this second half which features very little of either. While John Ruskin is on my list of highlights, the rest of them are after Christmas Carol. There's a delicious sound to kick off Bruegel's Dance with an achingly slow beat, growing violins and what sound like distant shoes dancing along the planks of a pirate ship. If it makes us want to move, Tango di Gaeta does that even more powerfully, as the tango we expect given that title.

The former is instrumental but the latter is elevated through an emotional vocal from Caterina Pontrandolfo, which carries ages of sadness in its timbre. She only sings this one, while Denitza Seraphim only sings Eleusa consumpta, but they both deliver commanding performances which happen to be completely different. Pontrandolfo grabs us subtly, letting her emotion sway us to lose the rest of the world while we listen to her. Seraphim is authoratitive, almost ordering us to bow before her voice. Neither looks for ethereal, not least because their voices are far deeper than Saviano's.

Frankly, all three of them are wonderful, but it's Saviano who dominates, partly because she has five songs to cement her presence instead of just one, partly because that includes the opening three which set our expectations in place for this album and partly because Souvenirs d'un autre monde, once it gets moving, finds the most abiding groove. It's the longest song here, running a little over seven minutes, but it builds like an elegant whirlwind. Sure, it relies very heavily on a mood that it generates but it does generate an incredible mood.

I'm not sure how many albums Corde Oblique have released. Wikipedia lists eight studio albums by 2020, one of which was live in the studio, plus three digital albums, whatever that means. The band's website mentions seven albums since 2005. I don't believe either source includes this one, so let's just say it's quite a few albums. All I know is that I like this one a great deal and, while it's likely that not all earlier releases follow the same sound, I'm deeply interested in diving into that back catalogue.

Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Wardruna - Birna (2025)

I like Wardruna, the dark folk side project of former Gorgoroth drummer Einar Selvik, in which his stagename was Kvitravn, also the title of the fifth Wardruna album. This is the sixth and it's more of the same but maybe a little more varied. This is neopagan music, hearkening back to the music of animist pre-Christian Norway. It's almost odd to hear it in the form of a studio release instead of field recordings. It's performance music, often ritual in nature with a strong connection to the natural world, which means that we listen and feel it rather than find any need to sing along, the way we might with folk songs.

There's a blinding exception here in Hibjørnen. It's absolutely a folk song in that sense, instead of folk music. It's a voice and a guitar (or equivalent stringed instrument). It tells a story, even if I'm not fluent in Norwegian (except occasional words I've learned from min søster) so have no idea of what's being told. If I was, I could easily imagine myself singing along. That it follows a strikingly similar melodic drive to Steve Earle's Copperhead Road only underlines that, its instrumentation merely provided on talharpa (I presume) rather than mandolin. The effect is similar, merely with sadness rather than rebellion as the tone.

Whatever the norm here is, Hibjørnen isn't it. I suppose the majority of the material here follows a cinematic bent, playing into what Selvik does as a composer of music meant as accompaniment, whether for films, TV shows or videogames. Most notably, he composed the music in the TV show Vikings, or at least what was done in a traditional Norse manner. The title track plays into that, as do pieces of music like Skuggehesten and Lyfjaberg. Birna opens ominously, almost like a threat. Skuggehesten starts with a sample of thunder and a galloping horse, but the horse cleverly rides into the song proper in the form of percussion. It threatens too, but Lyfjaberg is less in our faces, more of a background piece of music in Vikings than one bolstering a battle scene.

As you can imagine from that paragraph, everything here lives or dies on its mood, even when it's not particularly cinematic in nature. Hertan is a particularly strong opener, not just because it's a thoroughly blatant piece of music but because it's gloriously layered. It kicks off with heartbeats, adds a chant then ambience and builds into something primal. While we might easily imagine the scene in which it might appear, it would likely feature a band performing music beacuse this isn't background music. It's foreground music that we can feel but also dissect.

And there's a lot of that sort of music here too, which tends to constitute my favourite pieces. I'd call out Hertan as my first highlight, with Himinndotter and Tretale close behind and, a little bit further back, Jord til Ljos, the warmest piece here, which is comforting from the moving water at the beginning all the way to the tweeting birds at the end. There's a hint of new wave on this one, not just the Dead Can Dance that's often overt but maybe even some atmospheric Shriekback.

I can believe Himinndotter might be easy to adapt into visuals, but different people would likely see it differently. Where something like Lyfjaberg feels like it was composed to back a film scene, Himinndotter is the reverse, a piece of music I could imagine someone staging in operatic fashion. While this album is often dark, sparse or even sad, this gets downright jubilant. It's stirring choral work with instrumentation and the fact that it also gets witchy only makes it more adaptable in my mind.. I heard witch in Lindy-Fay Hella's vocals but maybe you'll hear something else entirely. It's open to interpretation.

Tretale goes back to ominous, but builds in a much more ritual fashion. It's far slower and sparser than, say, Skuggehesten, with the ambience being looped twigs or fire not galloping horses, a cry from a raven standing out all the more because of that. It does build but in a nodding drone that's later joined by melodies on flute and lyre and eventually vocals. I like it a lot, but it's one that you have to feel for it to work. I'd say the same about Dveledraumar, but that didn't work for me, even if it was for entirely arbitrary reasons.

It's the longest piece of music on the album, its fifteen minutes over twice the length of anything except Lyfjaberg, which is still only eight and half. However, the early featured instrument sounds to me like someone's blowing a musical raspberry, while the one behind it could be a road crew on the street outside digging it up again. Maybe you won't hear that, but I couldn't not. There's also an organic sound here which seems out of place, as I heard a whale breathing. Perhaps it's meant to suggest something amniotic, like a return to the womb. I don't know. It just didn't fit. It's worth mentioning that this longest song is also largely minimal when compared to the rest of the album, so less happens in its fifteen minutes than in most of the tracks that are a mere three or five.

So this is another 7/10 for me, but I liked it a lot. If you listen to movie soundtracks as well as dark folk music, then add another point to that.

Monday, 19 June 2023

Anoushbard - Abandoned Treasure (2023)

I don't post many reviews at the 5/10 level or below. That's because I have no interest in being yet another hatchet job critic who just slates everything he doesn't like. There's much too much good music coming out now to spend time focusing on the bad, unless it's a disappointing release by an important name that warrants a warning. One rare 5/10 review that I did post was of Anoushbard's debut album, Mithra, but my rating wasn't reflective of songwriting, musicianship or uniqueness, rather of issues with line-up and production, most obviously that they didn't have a drummer and what I presumed was a drum machine didn't work in the slightest and sounded awful.

That left me in the odd position of recommending the band but not their album. The band seemed to be full of good ideas; had an intricate touch on the guitar, surely in part because both members were guitarists; and found a good balance between quiet sections and heavy ones. Once my review was done, I was happy to put that drum sound behind me but I wanted to hear more from the band. Well, fast forward three years and Sherwin Baradaran and Siavash Motallebi are back with a more traditional line-up. They've added Arman Tirmahi on bass and Nima Seylani on oud, an instrument I'm not used to seeing in metal. There still isn't a drummer proper but there's a guest playing real drums and a real producer capturing them with a good quality sound.

And so this is much closer to Anoushbard sounding like they should, which means that this is worth a lot more than 5/10. The question was always going to be how much. Well, this is easily a 7/10 and I thought seriously about a highly recommended 8/10. The guitars still sound great, with some tidy riffing and some elegant solos. The album begins with an elegant electric guitar over an acoustic guitar, which is an excellent touch. The bass is mostly there as a rumble and a depth to the guitars, but the drums are massively improved, so much so that they're exactly what they need to be, with dips into ethnic sounds too.

In true prog form, it all kicks off with a three part track, The Righteous Ardaviraf, which suggests a story about a journey to the next world because The Book of Arda Viraf was a Zoroastrian text from a millennium ago. Musically, it's an interesting piece, with Preparation the calm intro, a folky and proggy track with a clean vocal. There are no drums until a couple of minutes in and then they're a return to the unusual sound I compared to beating a wall with rushes sound on the debut, the one good aspect to the drumming on that album.

Journey ups the ante, making its quiet sections heavier, introducing the drums in traditional metal form and adding a lot of emphasis. It immediately reminds of Orphaned Land but Queensrÿche too and that means tasty songwriting even before the crunch hits fifty seconds in. Suddenly we're in a metal song but it's not content with staying there, mixing it up until the guitar solo at the end. It's wrapped up by Return, which stays with the Orphaned Land vibe, elegant guitars over tribal drums and a host of tight breaks. There's even a choral moment to wrap it up.

While there's metal in The Righteous Ardaviraf, it's far more prog rock than metal. That shifts with the next couple of songs, which are heavy metal with a serious side of up tempo doom. Destructive Spirit (Angra Mainyu) is more extreme, adding a harsh lead vocal in the form of a confident growl that speaks from a position of confident power. It's inherently commanding, especially in lines like "Your soul is mine!", but the guitars back it up. A clean backing vocal shows up eventually and it's a nice contrast. There's more of the same on Tower of Silence (Dakhma), which shines because of an exploratory guitar solo over solid crunchy riffs. There's some fast double bass drumming here but the guitars don't even attempt to keep up and that makes for an interesting effect too.

There are other tracks here, but the one that I'll call out as a highlight, up there with Journey, the second part of The Righteous Ardaviraf, is the title track. It opens with an unusual atmosphere, the oud of Nima Seylani soft and intricate but playing within an ambience that sounds like a sanctuary for birds, somewhat reminiscent of Staff Benda Bilili recording in the Kampala zoo. Once it finds a pace, there are soft, clean vocals and a brief but evocative electric guitar solo. As on Mithra, these musicians clearly enjoy setting up contrasts and the tender Persian oud music stands its ground in the face of crunchy modern metal.

I'm so happy that Anoushbard have managed to flesh out a line-up. Mithra underlined the promise they have as a band but they simply didn't have the infrastructure to be able to deliver that album in the form it deserved to have taken. This follow-up has that infrastructure: other musicians and a strong production. This is what Anoushbard should sound like and they sound very good to me, one more progressive metal band from the vibrant middle east, but this one hailing from a nation that not only doesn't support rock and metal but often actively suppresses it. I salute the dedication it must have taken to make this band and this album happen. That it's damn good is a bonus.

Thursday, 27 April 2023

Matt Elliott - The End of Days (2023)

Country: France
Style: Dark Folk/Jazz
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 7 Apr 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia

Here's something fascinating. Matt Elliott is British but he lives in France where he's a noted folk musician in the neo-folk movement. His music is dark and melancholy and the one immediate and abiding comparison is to Leonard Cohen, but it doesn't take long to realise that this is something different. His voice, as we hear quickly on the opener, The End of Days, is whispery and beautifully broken just like latter day Cohen, but his hypnotic Spanish guitar rhythms is more reminiscent of Cohen's first two albums. That's an interesting pairing and it works very well indeed.

The biggest difference between Elliott and Cohen is that Cohen's songs were fundamentally about delivering lyrics, with the music, as glorious as it often was, serving to support that task. Elliott is a musician perhaps before he's a singer and poet, and he's keen on taking these folk songs into jazz territory, not just playing guitar but also saxophone, in a way that mimics a clarinet. One of the six songs on offer is an eight minute instrumental and the others feature long instrumental passages that work wonderfully on their own and somehow bring a strange focus onto the words.

Elliott is not the poet that Cohen was, though there are some wonderful phrases to suggest that he could be—"Sweep away the broken glass; some things were never made to last" begins Song of Consolation—and he has the brevity that the best poets find, discarding a thousand words to keep the one that matters. He's been a solo artist since 2003, previously known for indie electronica and remixes, usually credited as the Third Eye Foundation. I believe he's still active under that name, a primary band that's become over time a side project to his solo work in neofolk and dark jazz.

These two elements mix gloriously and the title track is a fantastic example. It starts out folk, just like a Cohen song, but the words don't stand out, maybe being an angry response to COVID, the guitar standing out far more and growing into jazz, as a sort of mad funeral dirge which is utterly gorgeous, not unlike the funeral procession for the elephant in Santa Sangre. It unfolds over ten minutes and they're ten unfathomably short minutes, even though it feels when they're over that we've just listened to an entire album, not just a single song.

January's Song takes us back to the folk. When the vocals arrive, they appear to be in choral form but it may well just be Elliott accompanying himself through echo and overlay. This is even more of a melancholy piece than the opener, but it's that rich sort of melancholy that Cohen mastered and which always lifts me rather than depresses me. It always tells me that times are dark but there's still beauty to be found and both are inherent in this music. There are precious few lyrics here, an isolated verse, but they seem to respond to COVID in succinct fashion. It's all about mood, the jazz swirling around the guitar like a tiny storm.

The most beautiful piece is the instrumental, Healing a Wound Will Often Begin with a Bruise. It's almost a vocal piece with the guitar providing the voice, because it's that sort of lead instrument, but it feels like an instrumental immediately. I was almost wary of Elliott's voice showing up but it never does, until the next song, Flowers for Bea, the twelve and a half minute epic of the album. It also has few lyrics, so after a a slow verse, it shifts into instrumental mode, driven this time by the cello of Gaspar Claus. Eventually there's a second verse that fades out in an echo, as if we're in an empty hall that still contains the ghosts of its years. It's all grief, but the emotions behind that do change over the dozen minutes.

There's a lot of emotion here, even when Elliott isn't singing, though his voice adds fresh levels to that emotion. Unresolved, for instance, is just a short piece to wrap up, but it's a sort of refusal to acknowledge that a loved one is gone. Never mind Flowers for Bea, which are exactly what you're thinking because she's gone, this one asks when she's coming back, even though she never will. I'm sure there's a word in another language to describe that feeling.

I like this a lot and need to dig back to see how Elliott got to this point. Not everything solo seems to be in this vein, but it may have moved more and more towards this dark folk/jazz hybrid. It may be that it's primarily for the Ici, d'ailleurs label in France. At this point in time, it's special. I feel a need to know when he got there.

Monday, 6 March 2023

Burgundy Grapes - Quadrella (2023)

Country: Greece
Style: Folk Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Feb 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

This must be the quietest album I've reviewed yet at Apocalypse Later but it's a damn good one, a core of soft folky acoustic guitars surrounded by fascinating sounds from a variety of instruments played by guests. Burgundy Grapes ares at heart a duo, George Kolyvas and Alexandros Miaoulis, who don't list what they play, beyond those guitars and presumably the drums, as nobody else has a credit for that. They may well play more between them, but guests add wilder instrumentation to the mix too maintain a progressive edge: a double bass here, an organ there, even theremin or stylophone when needed.

The base sound is folk rock, often with a psychedelic angle, as if they recorded this in a park in San Francisco while under the influence of acid rather than at home in Athens, Greece. It's very quiet, as if every musician is deliberately playing their respective instruments very softly and trying not to breathe to put off the extra-sensitive microphones, but that doesn't mean that it's without an intricacy. It must be the easiest album in the world to put on and automatically like as background music, but it's well worth a deep focus from the listener to catch everything they're doing. All of it is engaging and fascinating.

Tickle Road is a soft opener, but Possibility Song is a darker counterpoint, quietly threatening and making us aware of our surroundings. Wander to Stride is more overtly folk, but it's not pastoral, even if I could absolutely imagine a flute soaring over it. Instead of adding that element, it drifts into Pink Floyd territory, if you remember the Meddle album. There are hints of organ and double bass that remain tantalising. While a gentle riff repeats over and over like waves, I was listening to the chimes or xylophone or whatever's tinkling in the foreground, almost as a solo.

Sometimes there seems to be an organic flow to the guitars, as if this was aimed at anyone who's into the first couple of Leonard Cohen albums but doesn't want to hear his poetry, focused instead on his rippling guitarwork. It reminded me of Philip Glass's Glassworks album, merely slowed and transcribed for acoustic guitar. Initially, the tone felt like acoustic Wishbone Ash, but that goes as quickly as it arrives, replaced by the subtly psychedelic folk angle. Dream Echo has African guitar melodies, again slowed down, but overlaid with a lap steel straight out of country music. I heard a lot of Norman Blake here too, but, yes indeed, slowed down and softened. Burgundy Grapes don't want us to get up and dance. They want us to sit around and listen, maybe join in.

What surprised me the most was how few of these eleven pieces of music feel like they could have been the backing tracks to singer/songwriter songs. Crystal Friend certainly does and I kept trying to imagine what sort of unique voice would surely join in any moment now. However, this remains entirely instrumental. The title track is another example, though I felt Crystal Friend would work with a tender female voice but Quadrella a more raucous male one, maybe not a full on Tom Waits but on the way towards it. He would certainly respond to the carnival beat and the theremin that kicks in too for an enticing touch.

But then we're back to pieces of music that feel like they were always instrumentals and couldn't be anything but. Sure, the baritone sax of Thodoris Rellos on Curtains does kinda sorta take the place of what a vocal might do, but it's meant to be instrumental. Most of them are driven by the guitars but a piano takes over on Green Door, almost duetting for a while and eventually taking over the piece. It's yet another reminder that this would work effortlessly as background music, just something a little breezy and natural to lighten your day, but it also rewards the listener who pays attention to see what's going on.

And that's where I'll leave this, because I have to move on to another album, as easy as it would be to just let this play out the week on repeat. I'd say that you need to be in the mood for this, but I'd correct that to say that, if you're not in the mood for this when you press play, you will be soon into it. It's a refresher of an album. Take one after lunch and it'll better your day.

Thursday, 6 October 2022

Heilung - Drif (2022)

Country: Germany/Denmark/Norway
Style: Experimental Folk
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 19 Aug 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

If you haven't heard Heilung before, you should because a) they're a treat for the ears and b) you probably haven't heard anything like them before. They're variously described as a folk group, an experimental metal band and a ritual collective. They call themselves "amplified history", adding "from early medieval Northern Europe", but they've expanded far beyond that boundary, as one piece here ably highlights. It's called Nikkal and it's the oldest annoted music known to man, over three thousand years old and composed as a hymn to a Sumerian goddess. Nikkal was the wife of the moon god.

Really, they're just Heilung, because their sound is rarely comparable to anyone else. At the heart of what they do are the versatile voices of a couple of vocalists, a German tattoo artist called Kai Uwe Faust and a Norwegian prog rock singer named Maria Franz. Behind them on an orchestra of unusual instrumentation is Danish producer Christopher Juul and, between them, they conjure up a wild array of fascinating sounds. There are guests here too, a bunch of them, but I have no data to suggest what they do, so I'll just acknowledge that and move on.

Drif is their third studio album and its title means "gathering", a term that could be aptly applied to both the variety in the pieces of music on offer and to the cultures from which they're sourced. I believe most are sung in Proto-Norse, language so old that part of it cannot be translated, merely pronounced. Or maybe that's just a problem the internet has in attempting to render Heilung into English, so we can see that the opening song here, for instance, Asja, is a healing song, just as the band's name means healing.

My least favourite piece is in German, which is the eight minute epic right at the heart of Drif. I'll describe Keltentrauer as being performed because it's neither sung nor spoken, at least how you're probably imagining that meaning in a review. There's nothing wrong with it and it's highly evocative, but it also happens to be a poem delivered in German against accompanying music and sound effects of battle. It plays as a memorable experience the first time through but, unless we speak German, it turns into an overblown intro to a Manowar epic ongoing. I soon found myself skipping it. There's still a full fifty minutes of joy here without it.

I doubt many of us understand any of the other lyrics either but, unlike Keltentrauer where words are key to telling a story, it just doesn't matter on everything else. The music speaks volumes and we can tap into the mood and sentiment of each piece without problems, whether it's ethereal or aggressive. The ritual nature of some of them, with its inevitably repetitive chants may turn off a few listeners but anyone who feels music as much as they listen to it will fall into this album and be consumed by it, emerging a different person at the end.

It starts out gloriously with a piece called Asja. Faust delivers ritual throat singing with Rs heavily rolled and a beautifully resonant vibrato. Juul adds a slow beat to match the delivery of words. At first, the backing vocals are harsh and demonic but then Franz joins in with her high and ethereal melodic voice. This is a haka of a song, but one that grows as enticing as it is threatening. Anoana is just as tight and deliberate and it gives a serious effect. Franz has a very different approach on this one, shifting down octaves and moving down in the mix too. Faust is different as well, lighter and much more playful, in a back and forth conversational chant with himself.

These are resonant piees of music. Tenet is too but it gets strange. It starts out like a vocabulary lesson for kids, in palindromic form, then adds deep horns and mad growls and finally shifts into a humming motion to start the song proper. Urbani begins with what sound like crowing cockerels, before turning into a sort of military march or a piece recorded in an African village on a portable tape recorded by a roaming ethnomusicographer.

I found the first half magnetic from the outset but the second half took me a while. Nesso is quite the puzzle, because it features fascinating sounds that we can't ignore. Is that Faust or someone walking on gravel? Is that Franz or a musical bowl used like a bell? Maybe they're all conjurings of Juul using one of his esoteric instruments. Buslas Bann is a hypnotic chant with a deep male vocal that feels more repetitive than earlier ritual pieces and Franz doesn't show up.

And then we get to Nikkal, which I adore. The voices blend wonderfully and I just wish it was longer but it is what it is. We can't complain to the unknown composer, who's been dead for millennia. It's used here as a kind of intro to the closing epic, Marduk, during which Faust recites the fifty names of the Babylonian god of that name, in a ritual whisper against the backdrop of chimes and bowls. All I know here is that it isn't done in the order in the Necronomicon and it features more of those amazing rolling Rs. The side benefits of having a German vocalist!

Everything here is fascinating. Only Keltentrauer feels out of place and then perhaps only if you aren't fluent in German.

Monday, 17 January 2022

Riverwood - Shadows and Flames (2022)

Oh, I've been looking forward to this one! Very early in my redunking into the world of rock/metal here at Apocalypse Later Music, I discovered a great experimental Egyptian folk metal album by Ahl Sina and that prompted Mahmoud Nader to send me the debut album of his band, Riverwood, a progressive metal band also from Egypt. I loved both those albums, they both made my highly recommended list for 2018 and they helped to underline why the variety I need to explore here is not just in genre but in location. There's great music oozing out of the pores of the globe and it's often showing up in the countries you might least expect.

So here's a second album by Riverwood and it's another good one. It's also a long one, as not only do the band continue to write and play long songs—three here are longer than the longest on the prior album, Fairytale, which ran only a breath under ten minutes—but they're generous with the quantity of them too. There's an hour and a quarter of music here, spread over two discs. Perhaps the length, of both album and songs, helps it to become immersive. I started out planning to listen to the songs and see how they contributed to the album, but I lost that plot halfway through and I never really picked it back up.

The opener is an epic, even at a mere four minutes, with chanting and powerful strings. It's heavy, then it's folky, then it's both. In between that and the album's first long song, Blood and Wine, is one of a number of interludes, this one aptly titled A Haunting Lullaby. It's precisely what it says it is and it's a memorable piece, even at a mere minute, changing the mood before we leap into the twelve and a half minutes of Blood and Wine, which ably highlights how Riverwood are an extreme metal band even if they kind of forget that most of the time. This is folk music as often as it's folk metal or symphonic metal and, while some of that feels olde English, most of it is middle eastern.

Everything in Blood and Wine feels orchestrated and there are neat choral moments. Nader sings clean, though someone—maybe also him—adds a harsh voice here and there for contrast. Guitars are a constant highlight too, courtesy of Seif Elsokkary and Nader again, but the orchestral parts often take over from them. There are sections run through with crunchy guitar, then repeated as sections for bass. There's a lovely section almost midway where the heavy choral sound of Therion is turned on and off and on again over quiet guitar. There's a lot going on here and it's easy to get lost in the song.

And that's exactly what I did with the album. The Shadow is an odd interlude, but its ethnic winds lead well into Sands of Time, which begins like it's the real interlude. The ethnic winds are joined by ethnic drums and a clean and plaintive voice. I love these folk sections that endow everything with a sway and a timelessness. This one grows into a prog rock piece and, in time, prog metal, an occasional harsh voice showing up to add texture. The bass is often a highlight in this one, but so are the strings seven and a half minutes in. And...

Well, I realised at this point that I wasn't really paying attention to songs any more. I was merely immersed in the music and it didn't matter if Sands of Light rolls into Queen of the Dark or Dying Light gave way to Lustful Temptation. By this point, I was listening to Shadows and Flames like it's an pulsing ocean of waves or an undulating desert of dunes and I was content to let it carry me on to wherever it wanted to take me. Did I mention that I got almost Marillion vibes in instrumental sections of Lustful Temptation? Probably not. I don't think I wrote that down until after a third or fourth listen. How about Dying Light starting out very much like Therion, not just in choral vocals but in riffs? Yeah, probably the same.

Eventually I got round to taking notes again. There's some more glorious bass work in The Flame, from new fish Mohannad Ahmed, one of two members to join after the previous album, Abdallah Hesham on drums being the other. There's some lovely flute too, from guest Hüseyin Pulant, who seems to be on Sands of Time and Dying Light too but might not be. The closer, Solitude, is an odd piece, because it's gothic and doomladen and dominated by strings. At least they sound to me like strings but I don't see anyone credited, so maybe it's all done by Omar Salem on keyboards.

Mostly, though, I want to call out Babylon, one of those brief interludes, because it highlights just why I love folk metal so much. It does that quintessential Riverwood folk into folk metal shift, and it's a delight for its seventy or so seconds. This isn't inventing any wheel, it's merely doing what a folk metal song is supposed to do, but the very nature makes it wildly original. Every band in this genre has a different heritage to bring to proceedings and the variety you find when moving from Finland to Japan to Egypt is glorious. Riverwood probably think of themselves as symphonic metal nowadays and progressive metal after that, but the folk, with or without the metal suffix, is what truly drives its unique nature.

Now, how long do I need to wait for a third album?

Monday, 10 January 2022

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise the Roof (2021)

It's been quite a while since Robert Plant teamed up with Alison Krauss for a surprising but highly successful collaboration. That was Raising Sand in 2007, released on roots label Rounder, and it did very well indeed for itself, debuting at #2 on the Billboard charts and taking home five Grammys, including Album of the Year. Now I don't usually pay any heed to the Grammys, but that's quite an achievement for a roots album. I doubt this will make a ripple because it's hardly surprising to see this collaboration in 2021, but it's still a really interesting release.

Of course, the focal point is always going to be the voices, two very different voices from different backgrounds that combine as if they were always meant to be together. This follow-up album kicks off with a wise duet, Quattro (World Drifts In), and the harmonies are heavenly. Other songs work differently, giving one voice the focus and bringing the other in to back it up and harmonise when it's needed. One reason that the collaboration works so well is that so few listeners were aware of both voices when they came in, so there was usually an element of discovery.

Rock audiences, of course, knew Robert Plant well. His influence is stamped on pretty much every rock song released in the last half century. So much of what the genre does is because he did it in Led Zeppelin and his voice only gets richer. He was 73 years old when this album came out and he's not only still at the top of his game but he keeps elevating the top of his game. I have no idea how many people expected him over Jimmy Page to be the most inventive member of Zep over coming decades, but I don't think there's even a debate as to that any more. Plant is always interesting. I think his peak here is the wavery bridges on Go Your Way but he's amazing throughout.

Americana audiences may know Plant peripherally but they know Alison Krauss well, because she's a legend in roots music, not only for her voice but for her fiddle work, which is majestic. Check out a song like You Led Me to the Wrong, which features Plant's voice but Krauss's fiddle in dark duet and see just how much she brings to the table. Other songs feature her as the lead voice and it's a thing of beauty. Her first solo jaunt here is The Price of Love, an old Everly Brothers song, and she soars and soothes and commands. She's amazing throughout too.

What surprised me most, even though it really shouldn't, is how solid this is apart from the voices. It's so easy to see country music especially as being all about the singer, and overtly country songs here like Going Where the Lonely Go are beautiful from a vocal standpoint, but the musicians you so rarely see on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry are among the best in the world and the line-up behind Plant and Krauss here is impeccable, whatever their backgrounds.

I know a few of them. T Bone Burnett is older than Plant and has been there, done that forever. It used to be that he was best known for playing guitar behind Bob Dylan but film soundtracks like O Brother, Where Art Thou? surpassed that. He makes things happen and he has the musical chops to back up whatever that might be. Bill Frisell is one of the best unknown guitarists in the world (if you think about the general public). I've adored his work since hearing the amazing cover of Going Going Gone on Rubáiyát, the Elektra Records 40th anniversary covers album. He can play anything and he can likely play it better than anyone else. Mark Ribot is always fascinating too, even when not backing Tom Waits or John Zorn. Nobody finds grooves like Ribot.

And there are plenty of grooves here. Plant does that in his sleep too, but these grooves tend not to be the rhythmic grooves he loves so much. They're certainly here, on songs like Somebody Was Watching Over Me, but mostly they're Ribot/Frisell sort of grooves, where the musicians manage to pull a tone out of their instruments that we haven't quite heard before, that conjures up mood from the very first note and sets the stage in no uncertain way for the singers to shine. They're using different guitars, different drum sticks, different techniques.

In fact, the grooves are so important here that which ones connect with you the most may shape a list of your favourite songs. For me, that's coalesced over multiple listens to pieces as different as Can't Let Go and Last Kind Words Blues. The former combines surf guitar with an Elvis swing and a sassy backing. It's a lively but deliciously subdued piece with joyous drums from Jay Bellerose. The latter is plaintive, stripped down acoustic blues that sears the soul. The guitar alone is enough to make you weep, even before the harmonies show up to destroy you utterly.

I'm sure Burnett had plenty to do with the song choices and arrangements. Not everything here is a deep cut, given that The Price of Love topped the British charts in 1965, not that it sounded like this then, but most are. Last Kind Words Blues, for instance, is a Geeshie Wiley song, a mysterious female country blues singer who put out three singles in 1930. I know some of the songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint and Bert Jansch, but I need to look up others, like Ola Belle Reed, Randy Weeks and Bobby Moore and the Rhythm Aces. This is discovery for me and entertainment both, just like anything else with Burnett's name on it.

Wednesday, 26 May 2021

Strawbs - Settlement (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive/Folk Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 26 Feb 2021
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Here's a band that I expected to be long defunct, but seem to have stayed in business pretty well since they were founded at St. Mary's Teacher Training College in London way back in 1964. They split up for a few years from 1980 to 1983, but otherwise have continued on and released new material too. This is their twenty-fifth studio album, I believe, if we count one by Sandy Denny and the Strawbs and one by the Acoustic Strawbs. Perhaps more notably, it's their fourth in the past ten years.

Dave Cousins is the only founder member remaining, as everyone else who was in the band that year has either deceased or, in the case of Arthur Phillips, was only in the band very briefly. However, three other musicians here—Dave Lambert, Chas Cronk and Tony Fernandez—joined the Strawbs back in the seventies and have put thirty years or more into the band. Only new fish keyboardist Dave Bainbridge is a recent addition, dating back to 2015.

I think of the Strawbs as a progressive folk band, as you might expect given that luminaries like Sandy Denny, Don Airey and Rick Wakeman have been members over the years. In fact, both of Wakeman's sons have served stints on keyboards. However, this sounds wildly different to what I remember from albums like From the Witchwood, which admittedly came out in the year I was born and I've officially been old since March. Well OK, the instrumental Chorale isn't too far adrift, but the rest of the album is.

Most obviously, while this retains a folk vibe, it's a much darker folk vibe, Cousins's voice reminding of Johnny Cash in his latter years, thoroughly lived in and partially broken, albeit a little softer and less iconic. Then again, I'm old, as I mentioned, but Cousins is older than my mother. I have no doubt that she would sound more thana little broken if she attempted to sing a folk album. Settlement runs just a few minutes shy of an hour and many of the dozen songs on offer all have a darkness to them, even when it's not Cousins singing.

Now, it's not an evil darkness, more a melancholy darkness, born of a lifetime of experiences, not just the pandemic that raged while they wrote and recorded. It's the tone on the title track that opens the album and it's the tone for much of the album. It's less obvious on Judgement Day, while Flying Free escapes it, being a brighter instrumental interlude, but only Better Days (Life is Not a Game) is perky and irreverently upbeat, with an eager calypso vibe and a strong use of brass. How it stays perky with lyrics like "we've all seen better days", I don't know, but the darker song titles are ironically the least dark tonally. Judgement Day ought to be more negative than Settlement, going by titles alone, but it isn't.

The style does vary, even within the darker songs. Quicksilver Days feels like a country song packed in tight with reminiscences and regrets. Thats not too surprising, given that the Strawbs started out as a bluegrass band and Cousins plays dulcimer and banjo as well as guitar. We are Everyone feels like the dark side of the hippie era. The Visit stays truer to folk music, adding a Celtic air but playing a lot slower than we might expect and with a refrain of "Stay away from the window, lock up your doors." I don't think it tells a pandemic story, but the claustrophobia of the pandemic flavours it.

I'm not sure quite what to make of this. It's not a bad album and it is a little haunting, but it's a little much at the end of the day. After all, we went through the pandemic too and I lost too many friends to it. I can understand and forgive the darkness, but it feels a little guilty about it. With the exception of maybe Quicksilver Days, which is heartbreaking, all this material feels like it should be stripped down to its barest essence to tweak our emotional strings as a singer/songwriter album. It doesn't work as well for me as a disjointed band effort.

Thursday, 11 March 2021

Anneke van Giersbergen - The Darkest Skies are the Brightest (2021)

Anneke van Giersbergen, former lead singer of the Gathering, returns with an atypical release that's a soft acoustic singer songwriter album. It's apparently inspired by the Japanese artform of repairing a broken object, often ceramic vessels used in the tea ceremony, with precious metals, the point being to treat things that are broken but repairable as merely going through stages of their lives and even celebrating the imperfections. This had ramifications in van Giersbergen's own life and it apparently helped her immensely.

Well, I say it's a soft acoustic singer-songwriter album. Much of it certainly is, van Giersbergen's voice reminding of Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins, but even purer than the former and with more soul than the latter. There are strings here in addition to the acoustic guitar and hand drums, such as on Agape, the opener that features the title in its lyrics, and The End. I'd suggest that these feel new rather than old, but then both Mitchell and Collins were always contemporary to their times. Maybe this will feel old a decade or four from now. Of course, some songs, such as Losing You, which omits the strings, are timeless.

The structure of these songs is more interesting, though, and many songs, starting with the deep and meaningful My Promise but firmly underlined with the poppy I Saw a Car, reminded me of Rickie Lee Jones in their subtle quirkiness, and once I recognised that, the entire album took on that flavour, if to different degrees. My favourite song here fits this well too and that's Keep It Simple, with a subtly sassy groove, stripped way down from what's on Hurricane, and some neat cello and even neater vocal harmonies.

Talking of Hurricane, it's so overtly played that it isn't really soft at all, even if it remains technically acoustic. Halfway through, after Coos Zwagerman joins on trumpet, the groove expands to remind of Kate Bush and that's never a bad thing either. This is a busy acoustic song with vehement drumming from Martin Bosman but it's glorious. The brass is a great touch. The bouncy Survive is overt too but still acoustic.

This isn't what I expected from a solo Anneke van Giersbergen album, but it's a really strong release. I know a lot of people think of acoustic releases as being a very particular sound that's rather confined in its emotional reach, but that really doesn't have to be the case. Quite frankly, it doesn't have to be the case on a singer songwriter album featuring a single person on voice and acoustic guitar, because there are a lot of textures that can be drawn on, but this is a fantastic album to repel that thought, as it's full of admirable variety without ever feeling the urge to plug in.

And this also makes me wonder how a lot of symphonic or gothic metal singers might sound in a very different context. One of the reasons why Floor Jansen was so fascinating on the Beste Zangers show was because she sang in so many different styles. That show really ought to reach out to the agent of Anneke van Giersbergen, because she'd be perfect for it too, between what she's done in the Gathering and what she's done across this album.

And how pure can a voice be? What she sings on Losing You is so pure that it's a frozen morning in the sun before anyone's touched it. It's utterly pristine. This album may not be at all what Gathering fans are used to from her, but it's a fantastic album. I hope they check it out.

Wednesday, 17 February 2021

Wardruna - Kvitravn (2021)

When Einar Selvik played drums for notorious Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth, he was known as Kvitravn, or White Raven, so it's not too surprising to find his dark folk project, Wardruna, using it as the title of its fifth album. However, the project itself still seems surprising. Kvitravn drummed for Gorgoroth at their controversial Black Mass Krakow gig in 2004, with sheep heads on stakes, 80 litres of sheep blood and four hooded naked crucified models as a backdrop. It somehow seems odd for him to be embracing nature and traditional folk music in music videos such as Kvitravn.

But hey, it works. Selvik founded Wardruna in 2002, while he was still in Gorgoroth, and it's featured a number of different musicians since then, but at heart it's Selvik playing traditional instruments like the taglharpa, which is a bowed lyre; the bukkehorn and tungehorn, made from the horn of a ram and cow respectively; and the lur, a wind instrument as long as Selvik is tall. The music is spiritual, rooted in ancient Norse cultural traditions. The first three albums were based on individual runes.

I don't know precisely what any of this means and how it ties into Norse pagan belief systems, but it's hard not to feel some of the spirituality being explored. Most of Selvik's vocals are chanted, while his most frequent partner and only other real member of the band nowadays, Linda-Fay Hella vocalises in ways that remind of Dead Can Dance. The percussion sounds handheld, often with a simple main drum beat decorated by more complex drumming behind it. I closed my eyes a few times while I listened to this and often felt like I was in a forest clearing with a group of people dancing around a bonfire.

Synkverv is an excellent way to kick this album off, building as it does so well that the drums stop and the song carries on without them. However, it's the title track where we realise that we're listening to something special. It's a patient piece at six minutes and change. It starts with taglharpa, the core riff echoing through the piece like a hurdy gurdy. Selvik's vocal is a droning chant. The beat is simple and effective. Then other layers keep adding into the sound. A choir joins in. There's a crunchy percussion like boots stomping snow with an icy surface. Hella is a force of nature here, soaring through this like the white raven of the title soaring through sky and it builds so well that I didn't want it to end.

It feels odd to realise intellectually that some of these sounds, such as that crunching snow, are likely to be samples and some of the rhythmic passages probably use looping effects. Of course, we can also hear the album because it was recorded in a studio and mixed and mastered and all that jazz. But that seems odd because this is fundamentally spiritual music to connect us to nature. Technology ought to be anathema to this music, which ought best to be heard live outside in a small group, while barefoot and probably drunk on mead.

There's a lot here to absorb because it's folk music rather than folk songs. We don't sing along and I'd think we wouldn't to most of this even if we understood Norwegian and knew the material backwards. It feels primal, shamanic and meaningful, like Selvik and Hella are teaching us something important about ourselves and how we connect to the universe. I constantly had the feeling that, if I listened to this long enough, Hella's soaring voice, which rarely forms actual words, would suddenly tune into a deep truth.

There's also a lot here to absorb because there's a lot here. This album runs an almost an hour before the longest song, the ten minute Andvevarljod, kicks in to wrap things up. Some of it is instrumental and somewhat ambient because the instruments aren't restricted to Selvik's repertoire because there is discernible music conjured out of water and fire and thunder too. Some of it is simple and pure but that doesn't jar with what's complex and layered.

I'm still trying to figure out if that means that this works as an hour and change of ritual music for us to absorb or whether a good chunk of it is redundant, enjoyable filler that wouldn't hurt the message with its absence. Maybe after a few more listens through. I'm on my third right now and I can't tell if it's getting deeper or shallower. It's really kind of both, Flygjutal lessening but Munin growing, for instance. So it warrants a 7/10 for now with the potential for another point to be added later.

Wednesday, 6 January 2021

Tuatha de Danann - In Nomine Éireann (2020)

While most of the 2020 albums I'll be reviewing in January show up often or prominently enough for me to see that I've been missing out, this is one that I'm reviewing because I've only just noticed that it was released, either last November or December, depending on where you look. I reviewed an EP by Tuatha de Danann last March after being intrigued by the very idea of a Celtic folk metal band hailing from as far from the Emerald Isle as Varginha in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. I left it as a confirmed fan of the band and, of course, I want to check out their new album, their fifth.

It's as blatant a tribute to Ireland as they could conjure up. While they're generally and fairly called a Celtic folk metal band, that's not all they are. They dug deeper into Irish music on that EP, The Tribes of Witching Souls, than a single genre can do justice to and that's even more obvious here. It's folk or folk rock just as often as it is metal, though there are points where it's all the above, like their sublime take on The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

I know the song, so I know it's not a Tuatha de Danann original—it'll be 160 years old this year—and it made me wonder if any of this material is original, because it all sounds like it could well come out of the great Irish songbook. I know that I've heard Molly Maguires before, in a version by the Dubliners and Newry Highwayman too, by a variety of artists. It seems that one of Tuatha de Danann's key influences is Solas, a traditional Irish folk group based in Philadelphia. This version of The Wind That Shakes the Barley is done to their arrangement and John Doyle, from that band, is supposedly here somewhere.

However, Nick Gwerk's Jigs ought to be easily findable in searches and I'm finding nothing except the opener to this album, so maybe some of this is original music. It opens things up in lively traditional style, with the fiddle of Kane O'Rourke and the uilleann pipes of Alex Navar leading some jigs. If they get us dancing, then we're warmed up enough for Molly Maguires, done in Celtic punk fashion, with a guest vocal from Keith Fay of Irish folk metallers Cruachan. Guns and Pikes is the first song to feature a metal crunch behind it, perhaps appropriately given that it's a rebel song, though it takes a minute to show up.

As you may guess, the only consistency here is that everything is obviously Irish, with only one piece of music sounding otherwise to me, that being the closer, King, which seems a little more like English folk music to me, like a Fairport Convention story song. Irish music doesn't come in only one flavour though, so this is a wildly varied set of songs.

There are instrumentals you might hear down the pub. Some are dances like Nick Gwerk's Jigs and The Dream One Dreamt, a dance number driven by fiddle and mandolin. This one's a rocker too but not to the degree we might expect from a folk metal band. It's progressive too, easily being my favourite of these songs, excepting only The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Some are more plaintive folk melodies without additional emphasis, like Moytura and The Master Reels. I could imagine The Calling in a pub too, but it's a vocal song with clean male and female voices singing alongside each other.

There are heavier songs too, but they're thin enough on the ground to make this seem like a folk rock album rather than folk metal. That crunch that kicks in behind Guns and Pikes shows up on The Wind That Shakes the Barley too, not a usual approach to this song but a worthy one. It's sung by a female voice, that of Daísa Munhoz who sings for São Paulo power metal band Vandroya, and it's glorious. It alone makes me want to check out her band. The Devil Drink Cider is likely the heaviest piece of music here though, being a folk metal drinking song. Once more, the crunch doesn't start with the song but joins in once it's moving.

So, as a folk metal album, this is surprisingly lacking in actual folk metal, so be warned. As an homage to Irish music, it's heartfelt and effective. As music, pure and simple, it's a delight and recommended. My goal at Apocalypse Later Music has always been to cover the entire rock/metal spectrum. I merely wasn't expecting to cover quite this much on just one forty-five minute album. It's a folk album, a folk rock album and, on occasions, a folk metal album. If you like Celtic folk, that's all you need to know.

Monday, 2 November 2020

The Pretty Things - Bare as Bone, Bright as Blood (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Blues/Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2020
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Wikipedia

What perhaps shocked me most about 2019 was how many bands came right out of the woodwork with new material, often their first such in decades. 2020 has continued that trend and I see new albums in my queue from Jefferson Starship, Blue Öyster Cult and Robbie Krieger, to name but three. The most surprised I've been in a while, though, was to see a new one from the Pretty Things.

If you're not aware of them, the Pretty Things go way back, so far back that when they were Little Boy Blue & The Blue Boys, they didn't just feature Pretty Things perennial, Dick Taylor, but also a couple of his fellow students at the Sidcup Art College by the names of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They left in 1962 to join Brian Jones's band, which became the Rolling Stones, while Taylor formed the Pretty Things. They were charting in the UK by 1964.

This is only their thirteenth studio album, but they've only ever split up once, I believe, for a couple of years in the late seventies (if we don't count a blip in 1971). Since then, Taylor, the band's lead guitarist, and singer Phil May have been the core to which a variety of of capable musicians have flocked. Their previous album, The Sweet Pretty Things (Are in Bed Now, of Course...) came only five years ago, but this is still only their fourth album since 1980, so they've been hardly prolific of late.

And this looks like being the end, because May died in May, appropriately enough, at the age of 75, making this perhaps his final recording. I wonder if he knew that when he sang Gillian Welch's The Devil Had a Hold on Me, with lines like "I dreamt last night that my time was done." A lot of this material plays in that vein, especially Ain't No Grave, a song Claude Ely wrote in 1934 at the age of twelve, while he was sick with tuberculosis. "There ain't no grave gonna keep my body down," sings May. It's not the overt acknowledgement of mortality that David Bowie's Lazarus was, but it's hard not to read a lot into the songs chosen. Maybe there are more and it's just the selection.

May is on top form here and the acoustic blues format gives him plenty of room to shine. There are decades apparent in his voice but it's still smooth and there are few singers out so comfortable in their abilities that they're able to truly apply the less is more concept. This is a laid back folk/blues album, but songs like Redemption Day, a Sheryl Crow cover, quickly remind of the late Johnny Cash's abiding habit of reinventing material in his own image. Cash recorded Ain't No Grave too.

As that comparison might suggest, this is an inherently emotional album, not only because this is a memorial as much as a new release but because nobody listening to this can fail to feel that there's a spiritual element, an inherent wisdom being imparted in these words. The delicate guitarwork under May's voice helps that too, not just from Taylor but others: George Woosey, Henry Padovani and Sam Brothers, who adds a a banjo on The Devil Had a Hold on Me and a harmonica on Ain't No Grave and I'm Ready. Jon Wigg contributes aviolin to Black Girl, which also features a simple but effectively ominous echoing drum beat.

Some of this material is from the time honoured blues songbook, including a pair of Robert Johnson numbers, a Willie Dixon and a Muddy Waters. Some of it is much more recent, often songs from late nineties singer/songwriters or alternative rock bands. In addition to the Crow and the Welch, there's also Faultline, originally by the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, though needing surprising little work to translate into this stripped down format. To Build a Wall is a timely and touching Will Varley song from 2016. Another World may be new.

The Pretty Things travelled through a lot of territory in their almost sixty years, from sixties rhythm and blues through psychedelic rock hard rock and even new wave, but this brings them full circle with a gem of an acoustic blues album. It feels laid back but it's always intense, spiritual and meaningful. It's also often heartbreaking and I think I'll be playing this one a lot.

Phil May, 1944-2020. RIP.

Thursday, 13 August 2020

Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Folk/Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 19 Jun 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

I have to say up front that I was wary going into this album. I've enjoyed Dylan's work for decades but, the more I hear it, the more I find I prefer his earlier work. The Times They are a-Changin' is one of my top ten albums of all time, not because of how catchy the title track is but because of how deep that album goes. Now, I'm no folk purist. I love electric Dylan too and Hurricane plays in my head at all sorts of random moments. I haven't enjoyed the deterioration of his voice over the years, though, and I haven't found myself grabbed by more recent albums.

And, on my first time through this one, his 39th studio album and his first made up of original material in eight years, I wasn't grabbed at all. It's a quintessentially laid back Dylan album, False Prophet notwithstanding. It's easily the most laid back I've ever heard him, about as far from rough and rowdy as it gets, and it was offputting. I lost a few songs in the middle of the album because I just tuned out.

Sure, it's laid back (I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You is so laid back it's almost horizontal) and the music is emphatically a backdrop to his lyrics and, rather surprisingly for me, his vocal delivery, which was much more intonated than I expected. It's varied in style but almost deliberately inoffensive so we never actually lose a focus on the words. If we heard this as instrumentals, it would be safer than your average soft jazz album.

However, some of it comes from a less ambitious structure to songwriting. I caught plenty of cleverness in the lyrics, as we might fairly expect from a poet who has become a Nobel laureate. However, each sentence seems delivered in short and easily digestable chunks for a modern ADHD audience and some of the rhymes are cheap and scan awkwardly, right from the opening lines of the opening song, I Contain Multitudes.

But I kept listening, perhaps spurred into attention by the two long songs that wrap up the album, Key West (Philosopher Pirate) and Murder Most Foul. Every listen saw the album burrow deeper into my brain. Those songs close to the heart of the album started to grab my attention. Songs that seemed to be overly simple started to find serious depths. And I started to realise just how good this album is. It's just Dylan reinventing himself yet again, at 79 years young and almost 60 years into his recording career.

There's something of a growl on False Prophet, the most in your face song on this album, and it almost finds a Tom Waits vibe, albeit not so avant-garde. Mother of Muses reminds of Leonard Cohen. But most of this is quintessential Dylan, just in a different form. It's introspective and personal. It takes a long look at how American culture has moved forward, phrased in unusual ways like Murder Most Foul being a sort of ongoing wake for JFK in the form of a string of musical requests for Wolfman Jack to play on the radio. It's hard not to see it as Dylan's American Pie; it's just as cryptic but it's a lot deeper. Even the album title is a riff on Jimmie Rodgers.

That song is almost seventeen minutes long, dwarfing Key West's skimpy nine and a half, but they're quiet but quietly commanding and they contain a heck of a lot to unpack. Suddenly we realise just how much Dylan was sifting his way through American history through its music on songs like Goodbye Jimmy Reed and Mother of Muses. There are themes here, woven throughout the album, and it takes a little while to realise just how clever that is. Dylan plays with our attention spans on songs like I Contain Multitudes, but suckers us into consuming a heck of a lot more than we think we did.

This isn't a short album, running over fifty minutes even without that long final song that comes on its own disc. I'm half a dozen listens through and I'm still finding new things every single time. The Dylan of 1962 is in here waiting to be found when we look for him but he's inside the Dylan of 2020, who's an older, wiser and far more patient voice of reason in a crazy world. It's timeless but also very timely indeed.

Monday, 11 May 2020

Witchcraft - Black Metal (2020)

Country: Sweden
Style: Folk
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 1 May 2020
Sites:Facebook | Metal Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

The award for the most misleading album title of the year, if not the whole decade, surely goes to Witchcraft. The same title has proved troublesome for Venom and the genre didn't even exist when they released their album of this name. Magnus Pelander, founder of Witchcraft, ought to know better, because this is as far away from black metal as it is from their traditional sounds of psychedelic doom. I have no idea why it has this title.

So what is it? Well, it's an entirely acoustic album for a start, one that's restricted to voice and guitar (and a very sparse piano on Sad Dog), meaning that it's also apparently a solo effort from Pelander, even though it bears the Witchcraft name. There's no doom, and indeed no metal, to be found here at all, though there is some psychedelia on songs like Elegantly Expressed Depression and a plaintive, melancholy tone.

At heart, it's an introspective piece of musical poetry, a folk album that hearkens back to the sixties. I don't mean folk metal, folk rock or even a sort of neofolk that's an ally to pagan metal. I mean old school, sit on a stool in a folk club and peacefully sing out your soul over your acoustic guitar folk music that some engineer just happened to get down on tape for posterity.

The heart of the album is Grow, the song in its middle and the longest one on offer, and it's built off the same rhythmic use of guitar repetition that Leonard Cohen used to such great effect on his first couple of albums. That mindset is here from moment one and it drives the whole thing. Some songs, like Free Country, lean a little closer to Americana, a hint at blues and a lot more at country or what's become known as singer/songwriter music.

The other obvious aspect to mention is that this is very loose. The closer, Take Him Away, is so loose that it's hardly there, with what seem like more gaps between the notes than there are notes. Other songs are loose vocally, like Jolie Holland on Catalpa, the product of a band not a single artist, but still recorded in a living room like a personal gig. This could easily have been recorded somewhere in Pelander's house, in dim light and without anyone else listening, maybe in one go.

I can't say that I don't like this. It's hard not to like something with a tone that's somehow both depressing and soothing, but it isn't ever going to come off well when compared to a singer/songwriter of the stature of Cohen, even early Cohen when he recorded alone. It's poetry but it isn't poetry at that level of art. I certainly appreciated Pelander's music here more than I did his poetry. The best song is surely Elegantly Expressed Depression and, even there, I found myself caught up by the guitar but treating the vocal as texture.

What's more, these songs aren't ever going to get under my skin. They're not going to change how I think or give me something new to think about. I'm not going wake up one morning with a new grasp of one of these songs because my brain figured something out in my sleep. Those are things that I expect from singer/songwriter music, even if only the best achieve it. I couldn't even ascertain an overall purpose, as this is less an album and more just a bunch of songs.

So, while I enjoyed this and you might too, if any of the above caught your fancy. Just don't expect a Witchcraft album or a black metal album, because this is light years away from either of those things.

Apocalypse Later Music Reviews