The Magpie Arc – Gil Brenton: Album Review

By Seuras Og on 10th December 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

The Magpie Arc weld their bombast to the folk frame, with lashings of prog and metal, along with a little unexpected goth.

Release Date : 12th December 2025

Label : Collective Perspective

Format : CD / Vinyl / Digital

AN ALBION SABBATH

Wow, as Kate Bush once said, unbelievable! Church bells were the last thing I expected to hear, as this eagerly awaited release burst out my speakers. Not any old church bells, and certainly not the joyous rounds of tintinnabulation that might greet a wedding or a coronation, more the maudlin, the ask not for whom the bell tolls sound of death. The sound of the eponymous song by Black Sabbath, or maybe the Shirley Collins/Albion Country Band Poor Murdered Woman, a juxtapositioning between The Magpie Arc might quite relish.

The Magpie Arc may have lost Martin Simpson from their ranks, but have lost no appetite for ye olde folke-rocke, intent on delivering some more pre-millennial wallop to songs from earlier still. This is not cutting edge post this or post that, the arrangements all firmly rooted in what I would call the underground, if with shoots from circa 1970 something. Which isn’t to say this is old-fashioned. Let’s face it, nothing is, these days, and, by virtue the production, it still bounces around like a labrador let loose in a sausage factory.

WEIGHT PUNCHED

The absence of Simpson means two things. Firstly there are no songs from Simpsonian’s favoured sepia tinted US catalogue, where blues and country combine; these are songs all from the homegrown tradition. And secondly, with neither his guitar or voice, it is down to the rest of the band to gather up any slack and punch their no less considerable weights. Findlay Napier handles the bulk of the singing and, whilst he brandishes guitar, most the wrangling comes courtesy drummer and producer, Tom A. Wright, who is listed as playing, besides drums, keyboards, programming, electric, high strung, lap-steel and pedal steel guitars. Current live shows “guest” guitarist, Sam Carter, I should add, is no where in sight.

FULL FAT RIFFAGE

Back to those bells, which beckon in the 13 minute epic title track. As they toll, first in is a winding and descending guitar motif. Dense slabs of power chord then pile in with precision, like a heavy metal Tam Lin. Cobwebs duly blown, it settles into the quieter gentility of the verses, with Nancy Kerr displaying her voice to be in fine fettle.

A song, Roud 22, little covered since the 1800’s, it is a triumphant choice, mingling all the essentials of the tradition into a glorious pot-pourri of illicit woodland sex, suspicious husbands, the threat of non-therapeutic mastectomies and a happy, if confusing outcome. A couple of verses in, and there are a lot, the boys in the band, Napier, Wright and the subsonic bass of Alex Hunter, crash in for some full fat riffage. A chorale of extra voices chime in for the refrain, filling out the sound marvellously, various friends and associates from the Melrose Quartet, the Rosie Hood Band and more. Oh, and a certain Maddy Prior.

PROGTASTIC FLAIR

13 minutes is ample opportunity to pick and mix in a whole realm of styles and sequences, which the band apply with progtastic flair, as the moods shift between electric maelstrom and more pastoral string and synth combinations. The clatter of the drums and the boom of the bass are always superb, and the guitar parts, when they come, tend more to big statements rather than any widdly look at me moments.

There are some almost orchestral movements between the wondrous thrashing, calling to mind the mood of, don’t laugh, a mix of Genesis’ The Knife and Uriah Heep’s Salisbury. This augurs well for the live, and my guess is that it will stretch out considerably further and longer, once Mr Carter is given due rein. On and on it drives, and it would be hard to find a more decisive opening salvo than this, particularly in such long form, ahead the bells returning, over a bed of feedback. Follow that!

NEVER THIS HEAVY

Nae problem, with Napier then stepping up to the mike for a rowdy Burning Of Auchindoun. I had never quite factored in the Gaughan-esque textures of his voice, they here an instant connection, although neither Five Hand Reel or Clan Alba ever plied such a thunderstorm behind him. Industrial riffage with, again, some very Steve Hackett-y guitar, if to confirm that early Genesis tang. It bangs and crashes with abandon, as the rhythm section make merry, and the tradition has really never been quite this heavy. Napier may just have won songwriter of the year at the MG Alba awards, but this is another Roud, as indeed are they all.

Queen Of The Fairies has Kerr’s fiddle lead the way, bringing in some surprising flavours of jazz-fusion, at least to start. Napier is again the singer, but Kerr is omnipresent in the breaks, slipping between Ponty and Swarbrick. Have I mentioned the rhythm section? Tom A Wright has a drum sound that is laden with echo, the sound of trees being felled and logs split. A middle section adds to the prog awareness that makes this so much more than base metal. With Kerr tackling the vocals for The Ballad Of Rebecca Young, this is more a standard folk-rock workout, albeit still dialled up to 11. If already an aficionado of the band, by now you will be noting that this record is a distinct sideways lurch, much more folk and much more rock, and none the worse for that concentration of effort.

AIR GUITARS AHOY

Pretty Peggy O starts off on a glorious staccato motif, with a distant flavour of the repeating keyboard pattern from Baba O’Riley. And then, if some of the chordage of Gil Brenton recalled Tam Lin, the Liege And Lief version, obviously, here is a similar complex repeat, now in overdrive. Napier again singing, this is a corker and a keeper. Try keeping up on air guitar, but it maybe easier to stick to the rippling countermelodies of the bass. Some further lovely lead and this could be a composite favourite, especially as it lets rip, in duplicate and triplicate, for the send-off.

Thou Shalt Not Kill seems an odd concept within a style of song that is so full of bloodshed. Nonetheless, Napier takes on the full pulpit persona of a Scottish Andrew Eldritch or either of the Daves, Vanian or Gahan, leather, hell and brimstone, the backing all equivalently Edinburgh gothic. I didn’t see that one coming and neither will you. And now it’s my favourite, like nothing quite else in their canon. If nothing else, this is going to need an expensive upgrade to the light show that such theatre demands.

A RETROSPECTIVE STORM

All too swiftly it is the familairity of final track, The Mantle, that rounds things off, the single that preceded this release by a matter of months. At that time I confess to a degree of underwhelment, feeling there too all too much All Around My Hat about it, perhaps given the prominent placement of Maddy Prior in the vocals and Ian ‘Tull’ Anderson in the flute.

With Anderson having led Steeleye Span first into the ears of non-partisan audiences for Now We Are Six, and away from mine, it seemed only a short step before the band were cavorting through the Mike Batt helmed nonsense of a year of two later. (I appreciate other views are available, but I’m writing this, OK?) By virtue of the two months between single and album, together with hearing the rest of the album ahead of it, which has battered down much my residual resistance to it, I concede it is quite jolly. Ok, more, it is a fine piece of lightweight jiggery-pokery that will go down a storm in the live setting. And, yes, the flute is quite good. Really.

FULL MARKS

…..or very, very nearly, to the Arc. They have not only shrugged off the loss of potentially their biggest selling point, by rebounding and rebranding with a bang and a crash, revitalised and revised into an altogether more cohesive monster than even before. It’s their Day Of Folk in February, and I, for one, can’t wait!!