It’s the time of the year when those Lunatraktors offer up one of their variations on the tried and trusted seasonal mainstream music.

You can always count on Lunatraktors for something seasonal after the brilliant Solstice Wyrd from ’23 and the Wassailling start to ’25.

HERE’S YARROW

A remixed and remastered version of Yarrow brings a song of loss and violence; about being betrayed by those closest to you. Dark times call for dark songs, yet also callas out defiance in the face of abusive control, about standing up and speaking the truth to those in power. Released on Friday 19th of December for Winter Solstice, sees Clair & Carli offer a whiff of Midwinter sobriety in confronting the darkness within ourselves, our collective pasts and presents.

Accompanied by a new lyric video. Yarrow is about a place, as much as a series of events with set of static views from a bleak and unforgiving landscape.

BROKEN FOLK AT WORK

Yarrow is typical of the Lunatraktors’ re-workings of traditional songs. Conjuring up haunting atmospheres. this arrangement began with a double hi-hat line, which inspired a riff on the Rhodes. With their deep goatskin military drum, these formed the backbone. Instruments shift from character to place and back again. The low whistle moves between the wind and the lady’s lament. The bassoon echoes the self-important tones of the brothers and father. The gong shifts from foreboding thunder to the ring of sword blades. The voice of Storm Darragh moans through Lunatraktors’ wood stove.

True to Folk tradition, Lunatraktors always seek out the earliest texts they can find, looking for new interpretations and speculative readings. For Yarrow, they searched broadside archives online and their 1965 reprint of the Child Ballads (which has sixteen versions).

DIGGING DEEP

Clarifying further, the song tells of a fight between a lady’s brothers and her husband. But what is this fight about, exactly? Amongst the formulaic echoes of other ballads and the macho exaggerations — seven brothers! ten swordsmen! — are hints of a different story. In many versions, the lady tells her father that there was no ‘fairer flower’ than her dead lover. Is this the key to the argument at the start, where her drunken brothers are disputing who the ‘Rose of Yarrow’ is?

Child’s version C has this mysterious line, spoken by the lady’s brothers to her young husband: ‘Or come you here to eat in your words/ That you’re not the rose of Yarrow?’ In version L, it is his hair that is ‘five quarters [of a yard] long… and yellow’, which the lady uses to pull him out of the River Yarrow and drag him home.

For Lunatraktors, there’s a lost meaning here, hidden in many contemporary interpretations. It seems that the lady’s brothers bait her husband into a fight and murder him, and that they have her father’s permission—perhaps even his instruction—to do so. Do they do this by insulting her lover’s masculinity? By insisting that he, not she, is the Rose of Yarrow?

Centuries later — with transphobic talk of ‘biological roles’ and ‘traditional values’ on the rise once again. Society still seems unable to escape repressive gender stereotypes, and a toxic masculinity that can only express itself through abuse, control and violence. Perhaps not only Folk that has become broken?

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