Give a girl a guitar and she’ll gallop: more broadsheets from the Jess Silk barricades!

Release Date : 17th April 2025

Label : Self-Released

Format : CD / vinyl / digital

Raw and unfiltered

It is difficult to describe Jess Silk other than as a force of nature. Such is the vibrancy of her dynamic on a live stage. Some artists struggle with the transition from stage to studio, under such a circumstance. But, were there any doubt, Silk is not one who does, managing to replicate the electricity that fires her acoustic performance. Many artists who perform live and solo choose to embellish recorded product with bands and/or glossy arrangements. Indeed Silk has done the former, if not, quite so much, the latter. Here she is unplugged and glorious, with only occasional extra or alternative accompaniment. Although the core Silk experience is raw and unfiltered, rather than just an angry thrash, at which she excels, here there is a pleasing palette of variation, in style, if not message.

“Take the blinkers from your eyes, you are all that they despise,your rolling hills and bleak, dark skies. Line them up and watch them die” is how the set of six songs opens. Yes, this one is angry. A slow to medium burn, addressing the rack and ruin of this land, in the name of progress. Break The Pattern it is called. An exhortation to do just that and it has been a familiar clarion call in her live set for some time.

It sets the scene admirably. Any new listener will find nothing too scary, as the melody and lyric imprint, worming their way into your ear. Pawns And The Kings opens on a chorus of Jesses. A stark anti-war song that is as direct as it is simple, needing no frills to carry the weight of the words: “Now the sky’s full of lead and the mercury’s rising, a white flag stained red in another no man’s land“.

A song for school assemblies

The title track has a change in delivery, guitar strings now picked rather than scrubbed. A folk song in any sense of the word, it is a love song to the sea, to the coast, somewhere. Despite the decay inland and detritus all around, still the primal forces of wind and waves can put all that urban umbrage into perspective. Or at least out of mind. When an unexpected fiddle breaks in, from Ferocious Dog’s Jamie Burney, that further texture seems to add a further level of pathos. Anyone thinking that Celtic punk, the genre with which she is usually included, is just about noise and shouting should listen to this track.

Almost as if the fiddle has broken the ice, Atlas, up next, eschews guitar altogether, as piano bursts out the speakers. This song is another treatise on warfare. Addressed to Atlas, he must surely now be failing in his only job, to keep the sky from the earth. It is both literate and direct. If school children still sing in assembly, this is the sort of song they should sing. The piano, from Alex D. Hall, is suitably hymnal, gifting the song with a whole new ambience over the version offered as an endpiece to recent shows.

Lighters in the sky?

Safe Harbour has also been a regular live feature. The version here again ramping up the poignancy of the lyric, Burney back to attach a plangent fiddle line to Silk’s picking. “The sky is dark, the outlook’s darker; it’s started raining fire and brimstone in the hills, it’s getting hard to find safe harbour“. Generally more one for melody than words, Silk has a knack of making even me hear, loud and clear, what she has to say. Does anyone still wave lighters in the sky at concerts and festivals? This song, possibly the highlight here, demands a revival.

The last song presented hits a different target. It perhaps no accident that this release dropped a day before the four days of Easter effectively closed down all but churches and chocolate shops. If God is on our side, Silk certainly isn’t repaying that compliment, a heartfelt diatribe around the the futility of belief. The argument isn’t new, but it has seldom been put so well. Struggling to find a way to describe the songwriting style of this onetime Mathematics graduate, lo and behold, it is there already, on her own bandcamp summary of this release, Social Analysis. I can buy that.

“This machine kills fascists“, said the slogan, famously, on Woody Guthrie’s guitar. Silk’s could probably vapourise them, on the strength of this solid further notch on her journey.

Break The Pattern!

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