Mysterious mood mantras mix with melodic metaphysical meanderings. A charming set of spells from Angeline Morrison.
Release Date: 20th September 2024
Label: Self-Released
Format: CD / vinyl / digital (bandcamp)
One busy woman, Morrison seems eternally industrious, either on the road or posting near daily updates on what once was twitter. Somehow, between parading the exquisite Sorrow Songs project, her own solo shows, the revived We Are Muffy, her duo project with Nick Duffy, and more, she has found time to reprise and revise a few old, with a few more new for good measure. Rather than any full stop, this is merely a comma along the way, a prelude to a later and bigger project, destined for a solstice sometime soon. (Yes, solstice, those familiar with @angelcakepie, as she is known on X, knowing this Brummie turned Celtic Corn is a lover of all things pagan and hauntological.)
sense of summerisle
It duly starts all a bit weird, with a faulty tick-tock kalimba for Clouds Never Move, ahead some vaguely unworldly humming. When Morrison starts to croon, a birdsong serenades her, before a multitracked choir of herself coos in alongside. All a bit odd, it is the perfect scene setter, leaving the birds to finish. The same sense of Summerisle permeates through into the title track, a meandering acoustic guitar led melody that wafts and wends, the choir of Morrisons remaining near by. With the refrain of Swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, till someone finds my body“, it is all sounding a little like the Roches on ayuhasca, and is a take on the fate of the eponymous Shakespearian damsel, as she floats downstream.
hauntings
He Comes In The Night is about and inspired by hauntings. Continuing in the same vein of eerie ethereality, harmonium lays a bed for a the singers lower register. Indubitably spooky, it tip toes into a tone poem, a mood mantra of suggestion. The celestial sirens interject additional atmospherics. It doesn’t go far, and doesn’t need to. Quite from where ‘The Fat Lady Sings’ inspiration comes from I am uncertain, but it sounds like a madrigal in slo-mo, Morrison’s trademark autoharp a clang from an older world. The autoharp remains the main accompaniment, in broad sweeps, for Hours Of Sunlight, which, bizarrely, suggests a hitherto unrealised link between the Andrews Sisters and plainsong.
deep in the woods
We remain deep deep in the woods for Bright Blessings, perhaps more an incantation, a prayer, even, rather than a song, and if your flesh isn’t beginning to creep just a little, with further founds sounds filtering in, then you aren’t yet enough fully immersed. Stop what you are doing, now, and go back to the start; this is no time for multi-tasking. A blink and you’ll miss it ominous creak bridges the end of that and the beginning of A Circular Waltz. Footfall in a near derelict abbey? If so, the song that follows could be offered by spectral nuns, if probably from an older religion. Provided of course they had access to a double bass, this providing an undulating rhythm, with kalimba thumb picking a delicate melody beside the vocals.
If the title, The Ghost Of A Song, suggests even more of the same, actually, subject matter aside, you’d be wrong. Over a strum of acoustic, some possibly melodica, maybe more harmonium, adds some structure. Pulling her contralto still further down, this is a swaying lovesong in waltztime, evocative of the 1940s, if through a broken mirror. The same broader sense of tunefulness continues for A Quiver In The Heart, a doo-wop pagan lovesong. It is now you really notice the perfect Englishness of Morrion’s enunciation, a clarity often lacking in other voices, but all part of the myriad contradictions present here.
an uplifting contrast
I Close My Arms To You starts with further wheezy bellows, before the trebly wash of autoharp returns. It is as if she has suddenly found a voice for, now, more fully formed song, the tone poems of the earlier songs espoused for the fully formed. This in no way detracts from the first half, two thirds, of the recording, but makes for an uplifting contrast. This, too, is epitomised within Almost But Not Quite, which is clearly a lullaby, tinkling piano and trills of autoharp garlanding it all. Her voice little above a fully formed whisper, it makes for a soothing way to calm any lingering look back over your shoulder thoughts. Lovely.
Morrison herself says “Each song is an imprint of a feeling, a fugitive thought, a restless story, a spirit”. I think that is as good a synopsis as I could dream up, and will leave you with that thought.
He Comes In The Night. (Don’t watch this alone……..):
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