A red-top riot of newly written broadsheets from Bird In The Belly to celebrate the seamy, the sad and the dispossessed! Hallelujah!
EERIE FOLK NOIR
I’d be the first to admit I hadn’t realised these Brighton based purveyors of an eerie folk noir were still a thing. With little live presence, and 4 years since their last release, After The City, it is thus a joy to realise business is as usual, with the quartet dredging up a further 12 dark historical nooks and crannies to feed their fertile inspirations.
A CONCENTRATED DUSTY DISTILLATE
Folk-rock is what they ply, perhaps an increasingly archaic description, as musicians elsewhere plough ever forward, to find yet more novel fusions of musical styles, often the more disparate the better. As such, their sound might appear a little retro, at least at first, ahead a realisation that, like fine wines and cheese, the familiar often improves with age and experience. Jinwoo, aka Ben Webb, has a voice that is a concentrated dusty distillate of that authentic voice of folk, circa 1975, curving his vowels around words in a fashion that even Ken Bonsall, of Ferocious Dog, is no longer using. Give him a minute or two to bed in, and it soon becomes the only received pronunciation appropriate.
VIBRANT CLANGS
It is with the title track that the quartet begin, in choral harmony over a handheld drum. The melody carries a distant memory of Shady Grove, aka Matty Groves in the Fairport version, if here sounding more Steeleye adjacent. But this is no recreation, as the vibrant clangs of Tim Pryor’s guitar soon make evident. Laura Ward’s smoother voice pairs effortlessly with Webb’s, and it is a lively start. The percussion becomes more layered, courtesy Adam Ronchetti, and there is a mini-ensemble of fiddles, banjos and more, all from Pryor, keeping the listener in thrall. A true tale, it recounts the story of one John O’Hara, shot dead as he fled a botched burglary. with nobody able to identify his body. It was thus down to his dog to seek out his body, thus allowing he to be named.
Old Holburn is a smoother piece, a paean to, rather than the baccy, to the owner of an 18th century “molly house”. The melody sways gently, the sense of sadness near palpable, as the two singers impart the inevitable outcome. Picked acoustic guitar is framed in a a base of keyboards and fiddle, multi-instrumentalist Pryor’s adept production pulling all the seams together, up close and personal. Hen’s Egg is then a galling narrative of infanticide for a fee, under the guise of “adoption”. Webb’s voice is cracked and wracked for this one, the narrative buoyed along by a funereal pall-bearing beat, through which Ward’s flute breaks like a slash in the curtain, for a mid-song emphasis:”When you went down to the river, with your sister and brother, did you see the 400 babies asleep in the water?”
CHEERFUL STUFF?
All cheerful stuff, eh? And it get’s no lighter, with Webb now excavating another true tale, of a young man, hanged for stealing less than a sovereign, his body then displayed as a warning, necessitating his mother to retrieve his segmented body, by night, for due burial. I Built A Boy, it is called, aptly, as the pieces of him were many. A glimpse of Morricone spaghetti western tropes infiltrate the arrangement, lacking only some mariachi horns. 40 Elephants, as in the gang of that name, we know from TV’s A 1000 Blows. Here Ward takes over the lyrics, hitherto largely Webb’s responsibility, the switch appropriate, the elephants being a female gang. Set to her own melody, she also takes the vocal lead, and gifts it a chilling lone busker in the underpass vibe, late at night in the rain. Lovely fiddle from Pryor.
Until now the world has been surprisingly free of songs about cynocephali, of dog headed saints, of whom there have been, apparently, quite a handful. Webb redresses the balance with When Your Soul Goes Free, all to a unison processional tune fit for a Bal. A song I find hard to shift from my ears; “I’ll see you in heaven when your soul goes free“. Great bass. The more pastoral Fairweather McGregor echoes a deep distort of Simon and Garfunkel, from the pictures in their respective attics, mayhap. Handclaps, flute and soothing strings add and distract, respectively, the sense of madrigal.
TWISTED LARYNX
The title, Go Along Bobby, sounds like a shanty, as indeed does the song, adapted from a maritime variation of Katie Cruel. By now the sand and silk of Webb and Ward’s entwined voices are making perfect sense, as are the myriad arrangements of Pryor, to which Ronchetti’s congas and/or bodhran supply all the ballast required. This all strips right back, mind, for Black Annis, at least as it starts, with Webb again ramping up all the Grand Guignol in his twisted larynx. Annis was a blue-skinned Leicestershire witch, with long talons. Of course she was. Like many of Webb’s songs, he incorporates snatches from other contemporary sources, her a poem by John Heyrick, dated 1797.
Lambs must surely be gentler fare, yes? Not quite, being as in to the slaughter, a cheery ditty about a a youth in Italy, 15 years old, killed as part of a medieval Florentine Operation Yewtree, executed to remove the “temptation” to the presumably spared perpetrators. A moody reflection, through the eyes of one such lamb, it is grisly listening. As is a grotesque revisioning of Big Rock Candy Mountain, with all the Burl Ives bowdlerisation torn away, revealing the much starker realities of accepting lifts with strangers. Jolly, it ain’t, as the rhythm once more evokes a tumbril’s roll.
“AND EAT IT TOO”
The closing act in this litany of malfortunates recounts the Law Of Kissing, a celebrated legal case where the magistrate’s verdict was that “if a man attempts to kiss a woman against her will, she has the right to bite his nose off“, that being what had happened. “And eat it too!” Seems reasonable to me, and clearly it struck a chord in Ward and Pryor, as the words and music, respectively, are the most upbeat of the album, being as close to a celebratory waltz as the quartet ever get. Ward’s flute dances a veritable jig, and it is a splendidly uplifting end to a thoughtful and complex set of songs.
A PROJECT TO RELISH
If earlier releases have sometimes been just that much too arch to fully enjoy, too spiky to love, this time they have nailed it. Partly made with Arts Council Funding. for the Songs of Shoreham project, it is a project to relish. The sleeve warrants also a mention, containing, as well as copious backstorys to each of the tracks, a welter of unsettling images, showing the quartet adorned in alarmingly disturbing masks. These too were made by the partnership of Webb and Ward. I don’t know if they do much live, but, should you get the chance, bite it on the nose and go along.
Here’s Hen’s Egg:
Bird In The Belly: Website