First up is an album called Northern Cross by Albireo, which contains two people associated with Pilgrim's Way: fiddle player Tom Kitching and Peter Crowther, who plays bass with them occasionally. Albireo has been around for a decade and is a superior kind of dance band - though Northern Cross appears to be their first album. You can have a listen to some of it here.
Things I like about this album include the names of it and the band, partly because they enhance a theory I'm incubating about geekiness. Originally they met to rehearse at a pub called The Swan with Two Necks, in Stockport, and there is a constellation called Cygnus, or "the swan" - also known as the Northern Cross - which has a bright binary star called Albireo on its beak. This pleases me. (I'm also pretty sure from goings-on on Twitter that there's another band called Albireo in Japan, although Japanese isn't my best language.)
Pure geekery aside, the music is described on the website as being "from three continents and four centuries". It has a gemütlich quality that conjures a better future and specifically one in which I would be playing the album in an environment that has more and better homely qualities than The Glamour Cave. Perhaps it just produces optimism. (I should explain, as well as being the name of this blog, "The Glamour Cave" is also the partly ironic name of my home in Bethnal Green, where I've been since 1997. So although I like to moan about it occasionally I really have no one to blame but myself if it's not up to scratch. In its defence the place has some structural limitations and I rent it. A lot of people love it. My mother, however, really doesn't and wishes I lived somewhere with central heating.)
Northern Cross has a sense of urgency throughout that's to do with the band's ceilidh background and blends traditional instrumentation with a freshness of arrangement that makes me think of one of those houses on Grand Designs with thatch on the roof but a knocked-through interior and modern furniture. Best of both worlds. I can imagine playing it in the car, or in the background eating dinner with friends. It just calms the brainwaves and produces cheerfulness and although I've only been listening to it for a couple of months it feels like I've known Albireo for longer.
It was produced at Talking Cat by Jon Loomes and Forbes Legato. Nuff said :-)
Second are The Scarlet Jacks, who have an eponymous, first EP out. They are guitarist Greg McDonald, whose music I've admired before, and Gemma Gayner who plays a mean and jazzy fiddle.
The EP's cover is black and white and looks, rather archly, like something from the 1970s folk revival.
It kicks off with a flourish that belongs in a spaghetti western, followed up by an opening line that goes Twas in the year of 1620 that the first Earl of Berk-shire... Which is to say that it manages in an admirably short span to produce the exposition: we're a folk outfit, mainly. And we've got a sense of humour.
They go on to prove it by doing four tracks that are all quite different from each other, including a stunning version of Teardrop by Massive Attack and a pounding Dashing White Sergeant that suggests serious crowd-pleasing potential at festivals. Greg McDonald has an enjoyably distinctive voice that seems geared for story-telling, Phil Beer and Steve Knightley will be producing their forthcoming album and I hope to see them live in 2012.
The third outfit to which I would like to draw your attention is Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, who I saw for the first time at the first Bethnal Green folk day last summer. Here's a taste.
Ben had been in touch on Twitter about several other, unrelated things, so it was with a slight sense of disorientation that I realised how flipping good these two are - as well as how young. I took away a copy of their album, which is called One Light is Gone, only to have it swiped by a friend, which tells you everything you need to know about it really.
Josienne has a faithful and growing band of online admirers already. There's a clarity to her voice that might be connected to the fact that she apparently doesn't touch alcohol. But whether it is or not, the two of them have an immense store of talent which is mainly devoted at the moment to reflective original songs and cover versions. Here they are doing a Gillian Welch cover in someone's front room.
I hope that convinces you that they deserve a wider audience.
Anyway... to change the subject slightly. The other thing I've been paying a lot of attention to since the new year is not folk. I now have my own copy of the documentary Some Kind of Monster by Metallica, which has made a big impression on me. OK. It's about a hard rock band and therefore will not be completely to the taste of everyone who reads this blog. But it's also a brilliant documentary about a band attempting to resolve some internal difficulties.
Hands up. I've got a thing for Lars Ulrich: drummer, bi-lingual viking and metal warlord. But if you haven't seen it and you get a chance to, you should. Despite having serious Spinal Tap potential - because superficially what's not funny about the biggest heavy metal band on the planet collectively submitting to psychotherapy - it somehow ends up being the Anti Spinal Tap and you don't even have to like their music for it to work its astonishing charm.
I hate this word when it's not used right. But it's genuinely awesome.
* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed you could make it so by *liking* its Facebook page.
Totally agree about Josienne Clarke, Emma. I saw her supporting Emily Portman a while back and was very impressed; also reviewed her album favourably for R2 mag.
ReplyDeletePhilip