A pitch from the apocalypse, Ghedi stares deep in the void.

Release Date: 21st February 2025

Label: Basin Rock Records

Format: CD / vinyl / digital

FOUR YEARS IN THE MAKING

The first thing that leaps out this 4 years in the making release is the voice. Since we last heard from this musician, several things have happened. Firstly, he has got very angry, and, secondly, has found a new falsetto voice, amongst his others, to better the sing out that rage. There is a lot more too on this never less folk, never more folk offering, Ghedi himself the first to admit that rather than a square peg in a round hole, he is now working on a different mainframe altogether.

Let’s unravel a little: Ghedi left the UK shortly ahead of Covid, spending the duration in Ireland. His return, after a couple of years, revealed so many changes in his country he was unhappy with, now seeming a wasteland. Hence the album title, with any nod to T.S. Eliot not by accident . With his base is Sheffield, South Yorkshire, the album came together, over two turbulent years, and explains the post industrial sonic textures embraced. Yes, there are still elements and remnants of his folkie dues, but stirred up in a foundry boiling over with electric and electronic textures. Guitars are often electric, with even the acoustic played loud, rhythm sections grindingly heavy, so, to make himself heard, he had to find additional ways to allow that to happen.

BANSHEE…HOWLING…DISQUIET…

Old Stones epitomises all of that, opening with a displaced howling vocal, a banshee wail over plucked guitar, ahead an overriding surge of fiddles sweeping in. Taking a verse or two to maximise the disquiet, the uncertainty as to which way this is going lingers long. Drums thump as it escalates, a crescendo of guitars, strings and eerie synth, otherworldly backing vocals embellishing the whole. Less a tune than a statement, it is a startling opening salvo. Maybe one you won’t be humming in the shower, but you’ll remember it, likely unsurprised that Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada is involved in the project. (Only backing vocals, but nonetheless.)

From the edge of the precipice, it is then straight into that which Ghedi now dives. What Will Become Of England is a forbiddingly dour folk as horror story song. Conventional enough in essence, with acoustic guitar and fiddle, it sounds set in a deserted foundry, with forgotten sounds seeping back in, all part of a ceremony you don’t want to ask too many questions about. The guitar is the aggressive and abrasive style of Martin Carthy at his harshest, the vocals now “settling” into an uneasy mix of Kevin Rowland and Richard Thompson. The song is a traditional number, a take on the life of the poor working man and his lot. It closes with a dense blare of factory whistles and unforgiving weather.

SENSE OF ABANDONMENT

If Newtondale/John Blue are a pair of hornpipes, which they are, the same sense of abandonment infuses them. Fiddle and guitar play the main tune, fiddles shared between David Grubb, who also covers the string arrangements, and Daniel Bridgwood-Hill, the guitar Ghedi’s own. As the tunes segue, so the additional features seep in, Neal Heppleston on bass, Joe Danks on drums, with synthesisers from Dean Honer. Doomy though they remain, they still act as respite ahead of the title track, which blisters through a number of styles, starting off as just vocal and electric guitar. The tune is pretty, the arrangement not, if still substantively memorable. It builds with latyered strings, drums evoking a tumbril, and alien shards of synth. Eerily effective: “I don’t know here, I can’t tell this place anymore to call my home, call my home, call my home…….“

Just A Note has Ghedi hurling his voice to the heavens, unaccompanied, before he adds some harmonium for the full chapel, the string section slotting alongside. Remember the shock of the voice? Well, you like it now, don’t you? From barefoot preacher to muddy marching boots, Sheaf & Feld is a full frontal assault, referencing “fallen friends and butchered greens“, with Heppleston and Danks leading the attack. Clangs and crashes of electric guitar flesh it out, Ghedi wailing beneath them. The timing of Hester, up next, is perfect, dragging the mood back down with the volume, a twangy construct that brings back some further echoes of RT, this time in the guitar sound, a direct descendant of some of the wilder workouts around Calvary Cross, long before the beret.

MORE UNACCOMPANIED

More unaccompanied then, for The Seasons, the four part harmonies bringing back MacDiarmada, with the two of them joined by Ruth Clinton (Landless) and Amelia Baker (Cinder Well). For all the post-urban squalls of sound elsewhere, I have to say that these four voices provide the most powerful moments, and the most chilling, on this album. Wishing Tree returns to the format of a simple start, ahead adding swathes of added sounds, then taking them away again. The guitars and fiddles mimic the brass of a spaghetti western, oddly, but strangely aptly, they tending not to end well either. The need to shed gone, the track builds to a gothic wrecking ball climax. Try to imagine that.

To close comes what might be a coda, an endpiece, a flickering of life back in the ruins, as Ghedi returns to the Ewan MacColl songbook, from whence Just A Note emanated. Trafford Road Ballad has never sounded quite so desperate, nor Ghedi’s Sheffield accent so strong. With voice and acoustic guitar alone, other textures drift in from, well, the album is called Wasteland. Fiddle adds substance, the aural equivalent of a blood red sky. The song ends the project on a pessimistically pensive note: “I have a little baby, he’s the apple of me eye. When I think about his future, my thoughts take wing and fly“.

Sleep well.

SOBERING AND STRIKING

This is a sobering and striking album. Relentlessly dark, it is arguably required listening for anyone with half an ear of the future of folk music, and half an eye on the end of the world. Ghedi has fused his own songs, some trad and those of others, into a very individual standpoint. With musicians well chosen, willing and able to dance to his idiosyncratic drum, and the production, shared between he and David Glover, forging the apocalypse, Ghedi has placed himself centre stage to soundtrack its arrival.

Be afraid, be very afraid: What Will Become Of England…….

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