Embrace this profound release with the openness Sam Lee offers it with, taking the time it demands for a full immersion.

Release Date: 15th March 2024

Label: Cooking Vinyl

Format: CD / vinyl / digital

For a while, before the pandemic, Sam Lee was everywhere, or seemed to be, his ragamuffin Romany vibe seeming catnip to the media, he forever popping up on TV, barefoot and beaming, eyes beatifically clenched shut. I confess I felt an irrational sense of irritation at these appearances, the BBC R2 Folk Awards 2016 one such example, ahead of catching him as part of one of Joe Boyd’s Nick Drake celebration concerts, realising that, actually, he was really good. Then, when 2020’s Old Wow came out, I realised that, furthermore, he was really very, very good indeed, that cemented by a live show at Lichfield’s Guildhall.

It’s been a few years, but here he is again, paired for a second time with producer Bernard Butler, the once wunderkind guitarist in Suede, whose production credits stretch from the late Bert Jansch through to Neneh Cherry, Tricky and the Pet Shop Boys; beat that for a diverse eclecticism! The lower case typeface of the sleeve is deliberate. This very much follows in similar steps from Old Wow, in that it throws pastoral folk into a melting pot, with hints of a brooding Post Rock soundscape vying with the peculiarly English classicism of Vaughan Williams, markedly so, as choral elements creep in. Much of this comes via composer and arranger, Martin Keay, also returning. There is also a bonus for those who were lucky enough to catch the decidedly odd, yet delightful, film, The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry, based on Rachel Joyce’s book and starring Jim Broadbent. They might remember a couple of songs from the soundtrack, and even remember that Lee played one of Broadbent/Fry’s encounters along the way of his pilgrimage. (I confess I hadn’t clocked it were he, until prompted, which surely proclaims the stripping of annoying from Lee’s persona, even if the part played is, dare I say it, possibly a thinly veiled depiction of our perceived reality of him….)

Bushes And Briars is perhaps the folkiest song here, opening with an insistent chiming piano and rolling guitar, ahead Lee’s sticky baritone pealing in with a familiar sounding melody, a lone drum beat pointing the way. With words of “small birds sing“ing, strings steadily build up into an Eastern European cadenza, to underline the building sense of foreboding; “sometimes we find we’re in the presence of a reckoning divine” reads a little grandiose on the page, but, as electricity crackles up and into the song, it all sounds quite natural. One imagines Lee striding through the forest, with all soundlessly falling into line behind him, a cross between the Wickerman and John the Baptist. It’s an imposing start, which needs the relative dreamlike calm of Meeting Is A Pleasant Place to leaven the mood. Spooky Gilmour-esque guitar tones follow the piano and vocal, the melody now very Percy Grainger/Lincolnshire Posy, the effect together hypnotic. A choir billow up in the background, now with textures of a Bulgarian choir in their additions. Again, in description, it sounds bonkers, but cleaves together altogether naturally..

McCrimmon introduces further contrast, with Lee’s oratary vocals now matched with a clatter of staccato drums and a rolling double bass, echoes aplenty of Terry Cox and Danny Thompson, Pentangle’s rhythm section. (Here it is provided by Mischa Mullov-Abado and Josh Green.) This is a judicious combination, giving the track a lift his mournful tones might not carry alone, although, with that title, it is unsurprising that a there is a sense of a Hebridean air about the melody. Flickering electronica gives the song further late ballast, with the sudden realisation that the outside world has all but ceased to exist, so rapt your attention. Leaves Of Life offers a pleasing repetition of piano, it now clear the ceremony is but beginning. A more conventional post-rock throb propels this song forward, until a mystical cup bearing middle section, the spectral choir back. This is peak Wickerman, returning to that theme, altogether a little disarmingly, in truth. It takes the relative simplicity of Green Mossy Banks to restore equilibrium. In fact, without it, there would be a risk the album may have slipped just a little too far inside itself. Softly blown woodwinds are the perfect accompaniment to the gentle narrative.

Aye Walking Oh starts with Lee acapella, emphasising the roundness of his full voice, it feeling a further lament. “When I sleep I dream, when I wake I’m weary” encapsulates the mood divined, with woodwinds becoming again the accompaniment, with a quietly pounding piano. If it has a sense of You’ll Never Walk Alone; but banish Gerry and the Pacemakers from your mind, it calling up more the moving end of life rendition given by Johnny Cash. The flutes swoop and soar as the backing builds higher and higher, with orchestration thick and chewy. Almost as a continuation, Dreams Of The Returning adds its litany to the hymn preceding it. Orchestra and muted electric guitar do the heavy lifting here, the singer, one senses, a prophet of promised brimstone more than forgiveness. The imagery is all of a relentlessly slow moving river, no shortlived spring torrent, more the ground sculpting inevitability of a massive waterway, measured in aeons. (And yes, it hasn’t escaped me how listening to Lee conjures up all sorts of wanky language, that being a direct effect, prosaic imitation of what he somehow manages to make totally believable. For a more measured description, access Lees own detailed notes, that come with the album.)

Black Dog And Sheep Crook must be one of the most compelling titles, it already giving a fair crack of what is to be given, it indeed a solemn and moving treatise on, I think, solitude, around the outcome of a jinxed wedding, with what I imagine to be a lyre providing a discordant bed for his vocal. Actually an Arabic quanun, the textures add a stand of Middle Eastern mysticism not yet apparent, but no less surprising. After the emotional heft of the two songs ahead, it is a starkly beautiful safety valve from excess. Which leaves only Sweet Girl McCree, the second soundtrack feature from ‘Harold Fry’, McCrimmon the first. In the style of delicate 1930s ballad, set to piano, it has Lee crooning at his flawed choirboy best. Spooky spectral voices join, and it is really rather moving, if in no modern sense of the word. In fact, that might sum up this whole project, ancientness that defies category. It ends with just plaintive voices, and then voice.

“I wanted to sing a vision of what a conversation between us and the land could be“, he says. I think he has.

Here’s Sweet Girl McCree:

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