MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MAY 2024

 

Originally from Northallerton, North Yorkshire, but now based in Birmingham and currently to be heard on the new Katherine Priddy album,  George Boomsma  marks his album debut with The Promise Of Spring, eight songs reflecting on the passing of his brother, Tom, to whom it is dedicated.

 A gradually swelling, dreamily ambient two-minute instrumental with wind effects intro precedes Fallen before his vocals, echoey and wispy make an appearance as he sings “Should I listen closer to the world that's spinning round?/What love could ever be heard?/Nothing of a question when my life is here without/A notion of anything so human…Do they even notice that my life is here without?” launching a metaphysical trajectory that continues throughout the album. The title track, forceful drums and dramatic acoustic guitar, follows, something of a contrast to the Nick Drake references that have greeted previous releases, a song that speaks of both loss (“I close my eyes to see you again”) and rebirth (“I will be open to a thawing in my own sweet time”) from a frozen life.

Taken at a walking beat with brushes snares, chiming keyboards and bass pulses, the sweetly crooned Lily Of The Nile is especially lovely, both melodically and lyrically (“I am lost, certain days when I fear in a bitterness of ways/No need to be kind, she moves in and holds her heart with mine”), fully warranting the Elliot Smith comparisons he’s accrued. In contrast, 2 + 30 (as in birthday) is a scuffed, driving, rockier track with a train wheels rhythm that opens with the striking image “Empty as a kettle in denial” and speaks of the realisation of what loss means (“As a sister she begins to see/Older than the elder she will be”), leading into the ringing circling guitar pattern of  Cashmere Grey, a Wurlitzer-coloured evocation  of “winter's rain and snow” and “a silent cry filled with sorrow”, declaring “I will hide my inhibitions/From the family and all friends/As I seethe my own reflection”.  From the slightly Laurel Canyon shades there, he gets positively rock n roll for the strident swaggery Johnnie Walker Guy,  varying 50s shades of   Elvis, Jerry Lee and Cochrane decorating  the memory  of his brother (“He was a cigarette smoker, the wheezing kind/Dominoes and poker, he cleans up alright/Never playing by the rules or a part-time smile/And I called him my brother, the Johnnie Walker guy”) and how “all the doctors and all the nurses, the boy had them charmed”. 

The mood subdues for the nimbly fingerpicked Passing The Silence, the second to contain the image of a broken door, and again heavy with the weight of loss and grief (“Here in the house where I am supposed to feel safe and so warm…the year brings such a summer, so why does the weather always feel frozen cold?”) and the need to, as he said earlier, thaw, “Taking the time off to show I'm someone breathing, don't stare at the ceiling”.  It ends with Open Curtain, another rhythmically urgent number with its percussive clopping undercurrents, ringing guitar waves and flowing, fluid and tumbling vocals (for some reason I had echoes of Pentangle and Traffic’s progressive folk  in my head), the track, as the title suggests, about the mixed emotions  of finding catharsis of grief through shared music and  song (“When everyone everywhere else dreams of life/For how could I undertake all grief to say?/The numb and encumbered perpetual grey/So how can I open the curtain, the curtain is already open/Now someone has offered a way I should try/Just give it a go and have nothing to hide/That's all well and good when you've got things to share/No man alive wants to be heard in despair”.  The vinyl release adding snippets of his childhood family recordings providing bridges between the songs, it’s a hugely personal affair but one more than capable of touching bruised hearts and souls sharing similar wounds, while also encapsulated within musical settings that reach out beyond the introspective fragility you might have expected, a reminder that fire can often be a far better commemoration than ice.

Incredibly, it’s been 45 years since they released their debut album and to mark the occasion, UB40 have released UB45, a collection of seven new numbers and seven revisited versions. Of the latter, Food For Thought, Red Red Wine, King, Sing Our Own Song, Cherry Oh Baby, Kingston Town and Tyler are pretty much identical to the originals, albeit the latter two are shorter, Tyler by some two minutes. Of the new material, Champion, the vocal debut of new frontman Matt Doyle and featuring sax from the late Brian Travers, was the official theme  for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, it along with Home (with its themes of bigotry and racism), Trouble, Fool Me Once, Say Nothing,  and covers of Bill Withers’ Hope She’ll Be Happier and  Brenton Wood’s  Gimme Some Kinda Sign, are all evidence of band re-energised , recapturing that fresh reggae pop feel that launched them to fame 45 years ago.

Following on from last year’s live album with the Slapdash Cowboys, ROB PETERS goes totally solo for Dream Songs (Wafer Thin), a collection of songs that all began as dreams in one form or another, either at night or ideas that surfaced while out with friends. It’s a decidedly psychedelia-tinged rock affair, the vocals sometimes treated to give a dislocated feeling, as on the opening bluesy lurch Dream On (“woke up this morning/This song arrived”) with its catchy title chorus and existentially asking “what do babies dream about, if nothing then why dream at all”. Again with a repeated title refrain, Blue Is A Flame is another chugging psych-rock number, part Bowie, part Lennon, part Canned Heat, even if it references Roxy’s Do The Strand along with talking of  getting his other half a cup of tea, and an echoey vocal mid-section that might have come from The Idle Race. It slows the pace down for the Bowie-esque slow steady basic strum of A Parody Of Femininity, a number that belies the satire of its title (“I don’t want to save the world/I just want to save this girl”) slowly building to a Man Who Sold The World crescendo of chaos that isn’t as . A circling drum pattern  and keys set the stage for the staccato rhythm and jabbing refrain My Rendez-Vous, another dip into organ-based 60s trippy psych-blues, while a resonating circular electric bass riff underpins the pulsing The Light Shines, a love song of sorts (“I don’t mind of you stay, I don’t mind if you leave/ I don’t mind if you pray/I don’t mind if you believe…but I feel you should go away”) with prog-folk blues shades and another hook friendly chorus.

An appropriate  Latin flavour to the drums and the jerky, snaky tango rhythm  Frida And Diego spins the story of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, sung from her perspective and fear he won’t leave his wife. Initially stripped back to an acoustic strum and throaty vocals, Waiting For A Sign (“it’s guilt that gets me out of bed as day is dawning/She’s been away for hours to work this Sunday morning”) slowly builds in keyboards intensity before finally ebbing away again at the end. 

The longest track at almost nine minutes, Forever In Your Dreams is a musically  schizophrenic affair, the first part with its repeated riff and overlapping vocals all melodically soaring 70s prog-pop with twinges of Floyd, The Beatles and Traffic before, around the three and a half minute mark it slips into  a dreamy keyboards reverie and from there develops into a lengthy psychedelic quasi-orchestral instrumental with background choral  vocals and the title repeated like a mantra. It’s  lyrically enigmatic in a Syd Barret way too: “Plantacine Boyd/He can’t keep other people’s visions /Constantly annoyed  at the lack of time and consideration…Cannot hang around with strangers/Lives for the void and Molotov cocktail danger”.   

It ends  with the nakedly  acoustic strum, cellphones aloft, linked arms sway of One More Dance with its mingling of resignation and hope (“What if I don’t want  to leave you/What if I can’t say goodbye/What if there’s no other reason/Was it all a lie/We can meet all our friends/If we try once again/And we’ll see in our lives/We can dance one more time to the end”.  With an album launch at the Red Lion in Kings Heath on May 15, it’s another solid marker in a disappointingly undervalued musical career.

Back when he traded as Death By Stampede, Joseph Hicklin produced some outstanding recordings, often with a Neil Young influence, that never got the exposure or success he deserved. These days, writing some of the most powerful lyrics of the decade,  he’s half of BIG SPECIAL alongside ferocious drummer and DJ Callum Maloney on a self-declared mission to “explore the bleak and beautiful honesty of a nation in an ever growing state of depression through personal experience, poetry, perspective as well as varied and creative music”.  As such, debut album Postindustrial Hometown Blues (So Recordings) does the job nicely with its frequently concrete-pulverising cocktail of punk and rap as evidenced by previous singles Shithouse (about mental breakdown, both individual and societal), This Here Ain’t Water (about mental health and addiction  and the way the media criticises the working class), Desperate Breakfast (the depressing, dehumanising nature of the daily grind) and the slightly poppier propulsive Trees (“Life dipped and came back with a flurry/Whilst he had/One hand on the weed/And another on the money”. These alongside EP cuts like the rumbling Dust Off/Start Again  (“The poets and the artists now work in the banks/The radicals have spare rooms and paired socks/Take ya piece and give thanks/For your bolts and your locks/After all it's not yours”) with its Eastern European textures, I Mock Joggers (“Because I'm insecure about my weight/I should be out running/But I'm always running away/Or running late”), Black Country Gothic (“The black-country monks/Gargling hymns and eating the body/Of some budget Christ/With dirty children/Off-white angels/Kicking feral pigeons/And picking up half smoked nub-ends  taught to never look up”) and what might called their power ballad iLL (“I'm looking in the bag I've brought us/But there's only paracetamol and peanuts/That's not enough to feed us/A bottle of blossom, a can of sardines and a sliced loaf can't free us/We need codeine and Jesus”). These are all gathered on the album along with   new tracks   the spoken For The Birds (“We were supposed to be young/Now the old roads are paved with graves/The birds flew off with my days/Everyone is building without purpose/And I'm here smoking on a fat lip/With a cold toe, counting strays”, the outstanding, big-voiced huge anthemic pandemic despair  closer DiG! (“I'm just trying to get us to the sea/We planned a holiday years ago/I don't know if we’ll last another summer indoors/We've been through a lot y'know/But we haven’t seen anything together/We don't want to be here forever/We hope to leave before we're old”), the almost hymnal echoey My Shape (Blocking The Light) (“I am not well/She can see I've gone mad/I can hardly tell/She's says I'm pretty when I'm horny and sad/A whole year without a day’s work /I've a calloused spirit/I can't just be a number again”), Butcher’s Bin (“I'm just meat, dreams and gob/Hang me on a hook, some singing hog”)  and, the closest to Hickling’s earlier sound, the depression-themed recent single Black Dog/White Horse (“They sanctify the gold but not the tin”) with its blues foundations and spaghetti-Western whistling. I once described him as a bear of a man with a bear of a voice. It great to see he’s finally got success in a bear hug.

Thirty years ago, MICKEY GREANEY went into Abbey Road with producer John Leckie and the Enigma String Quartet, who he’d met at the Birmingham Conservatoire, to record the follow-up to his debut Little Symphonies For The Kids, a critically acclaimed album produced by Bob Lamb and featuring Steve Craddock and Simon Fowler from  Ocean Colour Scene with Steve Ajao on sax. Turning down a major deal from Parlophone who didn’t want to sign the band as well, a second set of sessions took place in 1996 with John Cornfield in Cornwall  but things just fizzled out and the tapes were left to gather dust, accruing a mystique as one of the great lost albums. However, finally, after John Rivers worked his magic on Leckie mixes (the original masters were lost), a visit to Prague to record with the Czech Philharmonic and Symphony orchestras  and a huge amount of perseverance and encouragement, it’s finally seeing the light of day as, borrowing a John Lennon quote, And Now It’s All This via Seventeen Records.

It opens with the Quartet in the solo spotlight for Overture  before proceeding into the strings pulsing, sweeping, emotionally soaring  Sweetheart  with its romantic poets inspired lyrics (“Love is a flower that slayed me/Out of the earth that made me/Where I return, wishing for your sweetheart/Love never came with a key to possess, turning for your sweetheart”).

Switching to piano, strummed guitar interspersed with surges of electric, Crazee Dazee, one from Cornwall, is a  bruisedly sung  brokenhearted ballad (“You’re walking on the roof, you’re asking me for proof/And in my own defence, there is no evidence/You’ve got me on my knees/again, I beg you baby please again/Be careful with my heart, you’re tearing it apart”) with McCartney colours to the vocals, the subdued melancholic tone carrying through into I Want To with its curiously sado-masochistic lyric (“I, I wanna need you/Starve you and feed you/Feeling like this time might be the first time/I, I’d even hurt you/Just to know, just to know, just to know/To know I can reach you/I, I wanna choose you, worship and use you”), building intensity as his voice soars to the rafters.

 Another relationship in crisis (“I can’t help it if you knew it/You’d be there to see me through it/Seems the more we learn the more we lose/I could learn to laugh about it but you know I truly doubt it/Seems the love we lost took more than the love we gained”), It Ain't Easy again has a McCartney persuasion, here as a hugely melodic pastoral acoustic ballad that also hints at James Taylor. Then insistent keyboard stabs open up the infectiously poppy Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow  with its ooh la la la refrain and philosophical acceptance (Today I learned to live with my defeat/A simple smile, a word can bring me to my knees…Today I learned to question my belief, the thing I held was true has moved beneath my feet/I think instead I’ll chase the love that once I fled”); Beatles yes but also shades of Roy Wood.   

Somewhere between Tim Buckley and The Moody Blues,  the quiveringly sung  atmospheric Sympathy And Lines is another majestic and moody number with strings and what sounds like woodwind again underscoring the emotional pulse, turning to the  acoustic strum and piano of the plaintive, empathetic, compassionately understanding  Carl’s Song   (“You couldn’t last another day without her/I could be wrong, I’ve been wrong before/Oh but I’m sure, that’s why I’m telling you/She isn’t trying to hurt you/You should know, when she’s all alone, all alone/Thinking about the way that it used to be”), a number of timeless quality and one of his finest compositions. The seven-minute Look At Me Now with its strings and background female harmonies is (think Coldplay minus the bombast) a slowly building swayalong anthem (“Look at me now/see how I’m dying without you… all my seeds have opened, all my leaves are grown…see I’m blinded without you”)  that should really be heard in a darkened stadium lit by cellphones, keeping it sparse with just the voice and guitar of the Cohenesque emotional spine-shivering desperation of Stop Breaking My Heart that picks up the same lyrical thread (“Think of me constantly, think of me more, save no emotion, keep nothing in store/Bend for me, pray for me, send me away, make me a stranger or beg me to stay/And if I’m asking more than you can do, stop breaking my heart, fools never leave, friends never part”).

Textured by a lengthy woodwind coda, the seven-minute No More  has a bluesy lope, contrasted by the following airy West Coast pop of Nowhere In The World before its epic finale with the 11-minute bonus track operatic opus  Venia Veda Requiem, scored for piano, brass and strings, Mickey exercising his falsetto, the song touching on Within You, Without You but perhaps more readily reminiscent of the Bee Gees’ ambitious baroque pop Odessa although the variegated musical textures also embrace the pre-glam psych-folk Tyrannosaurus  Rex in its final stretch.

Had this been released when it was recorded, it might now be occupying a similar pantheon as Sgt Pepper, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Days Of Future Passed. Belated, perhaps, but it easily gets a free pass to the ranks and should deservedly elevate  Greaney from the ranks of cult obscurity  to be recognised as one of the finest songwriters and craftsmen of his generation. The question being of course, after 30s years, what about some wholly new material?

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2024

 

Having garnered both lavish critical praise and commercial success for her 2021 debut, The Eternal Rocks Beneath, Katherine Priddy   returns with  The Pendulum Swing (Cooking Vinyl),  what might have been the difficult second album given that she’d lived with many of the songs on the first since childhood. But, rooted in themes of nostalgia, home and of the push and pull of letting go and holding on,  the pendulum swing of the title, it glows with an effortless maturity and grace in transitioning from  those teenage years to womanhood, from someone discovering their art to someone to whom it feels second nature.

Producer Simon J Weaver on synths, it opens with a brief instrumental, ‘Returning’, setting the ambience and conjuring images of a grandfather clock counting out the passing minutes in some twilight hallway, with occasional scratches and rustles of the life of the house. It ebbs into ‘Selah’, the first song she ever wrote, Harry Fausing Smith on violin and viola with Polly Virr on cello while Priddy dances around the guitar strings, her pure, pastoral voice with its echoes of  Vashti Bunyan floating into view like evening mist.  The song takes its title from the Hebrew word variously meaning to reflect or  raise voices in praise (coincidentally it’s also the title of the second track on Kanye West’s   2019 album Jesus Is King) and as such finds her in metaphysical mood, basking in the arms of the moon (wonderfully described as her “jaundiced sun”) as “My lady danced on through the night/She poured like honey across my skin”  and “Pleasure shivered down my spine/I reached up played with the divine/She ran her fingers through my mind”. There’s a sensuality here that tingles with the spirits of Rossetti and Dickinson, conjuring a secret lover that fears exposure in the light as she soothes  “Don’t let the devil dawn frighten you my love/As your indigo gets tainted with his blood/Hush now darling morning has come/But I’ll find a time when we can be one/And a waiting world will watch beneath her/As my lady melts into the aether”. 

Opening with field recording samples and joined by Marcus Hamblett on muted brass and double bass, the dreamily lullabying ‘The First House On The Left’ is inspired by the house where she grew up (“the boat made of old bricks and mortar/That’s kept us afloat as we sail through the years”) and the memories captured within its  walls over the centuries (“All of their voices still breathe in these walls/It's as though things never change here at all”) and its various occupants (“is this where they slept on the way to the jail?/Or the shop where the lady had sweeties for sale?/Or is this just the nest that was emptied by war?/Or the room where the next generation was born?”), the lyrics containing the phrase  from which the album title derives and capturing the urge to leave but also the urge to return to the comfort of the past (“I try to go but home pulls me back in”).

Leading in with drone and fingerpicked acoustic and joined by John Smith on lead guitar,  ‘These Words Of Mine’ is a quietly heartbreaking snapshot of fears of a relationship crumbling (“At night I try my best to climb the walls that you’ve been building/It’s hard to know where to start/Would it be so hard to say three words before you go?/‘Cause I just need to know/That you’re not going to go and break my heart…All of these words and you’ve none left for me/Just unspoken sentences lost to a breeze”). As such, it’s mirrored by the post-break-up angst of ‘Does She Hold You Like I Did’ (“they say you tried to find someone easier to love, and yes/Guess I’m no blessing, but I must confess/That I have never loved you more”), an uptempo number that opens with a crash of drums, string and Hamblett’s trumpet, setting an urgent rhythm that calls Thea Gilmore to mind (though I suspect Charlotte Bronte melodrama might be a literary influence in the line “when you’re standing on the cliff edge and you see the waves beneath/Is it my voice that you hear?/Is my face that you see?”) as it drowns in denial (“Cause I’ll tell myself you miss me until I believe it’s true”). 

Returning to traditional folk colours with the loping circular fingerpicked rhythm of ‘Northern Sunrise’, George Boomsma on backing vocals, is another love song etched in pastoral and giddily sexual imagery (“Stinking of woodsmoke, rum and wildflowers/Was it the sun or the moonshine it drove us to dance there for hours/Reeling from nettles and ale that you stole from the bar/Your voice made me enter, your skin made me stay/We move like the water, two currents merged, meeting halfway/Lost my defences somewhere in the back of a car”). Once again there’s that tug of conflicting desires (“I know we’re both drifters, not ones to stay still/I’m scared of freewheeling but I’m so sick of struggling uphill/Give me an orbit that holds me whilst letting me spin”) and of  resistance and submission (“god knows I tried/To resist you from the moment I kissed you/One night near the sea/Never dreamt you’d be drowning with me”) that balances the rush with the need to go slow (“We don’t fall in love, we rise/Like the dawn burns slow”).

Boomsma hangs around for the suitably swaying ‘A Boat On The River’ (inspired her dream of having a  canal boat), Virr back on cello and Hamblett on brass, an intimately, whisperingly sung number about feeling adrift and urban dislocation (“This city’s not home, though it knows me well/It’s cradled me close for some time/But when I’m alone and the traffic stops beating/I can’t get the thoughts from my mind/Am I just lost? Could I be lonely?/Is it just the rain we’ve had so much of lately?/Or is it just that this city’s been bringing me down?”) and a wish to just live the simple life (“I’ll go where the current takes me/All that I want is to live slow and easy/One day at a time is enough speed to please me/A dog by the door and someone to sing me to sleep…To rise with the dawn, to live by the seasons/To accept that things change without asking for reasons/To sleep like a baby, to love and be loved in return”).

Smith returning on lead guitar, the lovingly picked  and caressingly sung ‘Father Of Two’ is, as you might imagine, for her dad (“The first to ever hold me and the last to let me down”) and her journey “from that small drumbeat/On an ultrasound”, the track opening with a clip from an old cassette recording of him and her mum talking to her and her twin brother when they were just three, the line “And though there were times when tides were low/It’s good to know that eight strong legs/Trod water through it all” a lovely image of her family.

Opening with the sound of a phone ringing and an answerphone message, built around an electric guitar pattern that is more complex than it sounds, ‘Anyways, Always’ is a bittersweet number about checking in on and flame, a relationship that drifted apart but without any hard feelings (“how was I supposed to know/That you were never mine to keep/And the feelings you awakened/Were never meant to get this deep/We’re two ships passing at night/A moment, a trick of the light/I just wish we’d had a little time… I know we both had reasons to keep moving/A shame that in the end it got confusing/I’d like to think we tried in our own ways”).

Kicking up the tempo, ‘Walnut Shell’,  again is about family, specifically her twin brother Jack who moved to New Zealand a couple of years back, the bond captured in lines like “Two lines upon the door frame/Four handprints on the wall…Nine months swimming the same sea/Before we came to shore/At ten to twelve on Wednesday ninth/Ninety ninety-four” and how “We’re two halves of a walnut shell/What’s in you’s in me as well”.

The final song, a co-write with Boomsma who shares vocals along with acoustic guitar and banjo with Smith on lead, Hamblett on double bass and Weaver on piano and brushed drums, ‘Ready To Go’ is  a dreamy country waltz (complete with semi-yodel) that could be about a parting of the ways and an acceptance of  coming to the end of life and love’s trail (“the curtain must fall on our show/It’s my time to leave and I’m ready to go”),beautifully accompanied by a backing vocals chorus that includes both her brother, mother and father John. This would be your new favourite funeral song.

It ends as it began with a brief atmospheric synth instrumental, the aptly titled ‘Leaving’, a perfect bookend to an album that (having tickled the Top 100 and   topped the Folk Charts) is guaranteed to be among the year end best of lists and see her moving to the next level in the constellation of contemporary folk. 

Lining up as Max Newy (vocals), India Armstrong (bass), Elliot Rawlings (guitar) and Jake Bishop (drums), OVERPASS deserve to ride high on the back of  self-released debut EP From the Night, the title track opener positioning them in the same euphoric anthem territory as early Editors and Razorlight with its big noise drama. Alright is more of a propulsive chugger  anchored by Armstrong’s bass and with its driving drums and ebullient guitars. Stay Up has more of a Blink/Weezer feel while Wild Eyes, with its initially mixed back vocals, again sprays out hooks and riffs as Bishop’s kit provides a  solid foundation. Loose limbed reverberating bass is the framework to which Beautiful with its  soaring vocals  is pinned. “We still need the chance to be beautiful”  sings Newy. This terrific debut is ample evidence they’re already stunning.

The latter end of the month brings True Story (SAE), the fourth studio album from the URBAN FOLK QUARTET, headed up by multi-instrumentalist and producer Joe Broughton alongside Galician fiddle player Paloma, cajón maestro Tom Chapman, and banjo wizard Dan Walsh (though they also switch instruments). A mix of rousing, robust instrumentals and their interpretations of an eclectic choice of covers. That’s made clear from the start with a splendid folk reimaging of Peter Gabriel’s  Solsbury Hill that features Fairport’s Dave Pegg on bass and Trigás  nine-year-old  daughter, Sabela on fiddle player. Elsewhere other guest contributions come from Chris and Kellie While who join other Broughton family members Ben and Sal (one of his last recordings, passing in Dec 22) on slide and bass, respectively, for, Walsh on vocals, a transformative reading of bluegrass number Coal Minin' Man that opens gently with mournful fiddle before breaking into a rhythmic drive that embraces   funk and   jazz influenced hip hop. 

Although the booklet omits to credit him, Walsh, backed up by Chris While with Pegg on bass, also sings  lead on Long Time Traveller, written (as Long Time Travelling) in 1856 by Elder Edmund Dumas (though in fact lifted from English hymn writer Isaac Watts)  and more often called White in tribute to Benjamin Franklin White, compiler of The Sacred Harp.  Given a fiddle driven bluegrass arrangement it interpolates Trigás  instrumental mid-section Heading Home.   The other vocal track, featuring all voices save Joe’s, is the rhythmically choppy Indian Tea, written by Roger Wilson based on the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken.

Turning to the instrumentals, these all stem from the band itself, the first up being the pairing One Day You'll Be Right/The Clock with its hand percussion and fiddle first [part and the second scurrying along like the years flying past. Twinning Before Your Eyes/The Whiplash Reel, written respectively by Trigás and Walsh, opens in stately Celtic manner with the second rowdier tune informed by Bangladeshi folk songs and the sounds of the sitar and sarangi. 

Trigás’s six-minute Turning Point/High Hopes/Driving Force darts all over, from a funky percussive and bass throbbed intro, to fiddle reel to a frenetic pizzicato fiddle and banjo break before coming to a dead stop. Which just leaves Broughton’s decidedly Scottish-flavoured Circus Tunes (inspired by his days as a child under a travelling circus tent)  that has Sal on bass and Rosie Rutherford guesting on bass clarinet and again  takes the twin fiddles, guitar and mandolin all over the tempo show.

Exhilarating stuff and, alongside the Bonfire Radicals, incontrovertible evidence that the crucible of inventive, instrumentally transfigurative  folk is firmly seated in Birmingham.

A new name, 17-year-old  LOLA BROWN makes her debut with the self-released Rainbow, a whisperingly sung, strings-backed acoustic ballad about self-discovery and seeing beyond appearances and appreciating someone’s full spectrum. Early days, but there’s potential here to be the next Katherine Priddy. (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082967512084)

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN FEBRUARY 2024

Comprising Glenn Smyth and Sebastian Maynard Francis, Tom Ford having moved out of the area, psych/pop duo SOLAR EYES make their eponymous Fierce Panda album debut in persuasive manner opening with synthesized wailing sirens before distorted vocals,  spaghetti  Western guitar riff and driving drums breach the walls, riding a stroboscopic rhythm for Alcatraz, a number inspired by both feeling trapped in a stormy relationship,  his other half holding the keys to the cell,  and Smyth having watched the old Clint Eastwood film Escape from Alcatraz. 

The track fades away but, early Primal Scream giving way to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club,  the intensity continues with Roll The Dice, a number about having a go and believing in yourself, and damn what others think. Written in Texas and infused with  desert atmospherics, the urgent, echoing vocals Let’s Run Way again conjures a Spaghetti western vibe with a darkness that feels like Amigo The Devil on amphetamines, described by Smyth as Fast Car with a Brummie slant, inspired by small-town tales of daylight robberies in times of old and tales of the last crimes of   Bonnie and Clyde.

 

The title of Deep Trip gives a fair idea of where it’s at musically, a slow narcotic swirl  with a Pink Floyd feel and inspired by a scene in the second series of True Detective that dissolves into a psych guitar finale. On then to the cosmic warbling intro to Bulldozer before it explodes into another strobe rhythm with distorted vocals and driving drums, the song designed to capture the turbulent feelings and excitement of newfound love.

They reach the mid-point with Dreaming of The Moon, a sort of ELO meets spaghetti Western ballad set on the moon with its reverb guitars and tumbling drums, Smyth in semi-falsetto vocal mode. A definite album standout.  As is, channelling The Ronettes via The Jesus and Mary Chain, On Top of the World, a revisiting of an old song he recorded back in 2014 with producer/engineer David McCabe and which, featuring female vocals, was used on various TV shows

And from old to brand new with She Kissed The Gun which keeps the Spector link taking the title from what he allegedly told police on his arrest, the slow prowling track, however, being decidedly more heady, Bowie-informed, dark space rock. (At Least) Paranoia Loves You, written about someone Smyth had to put up with for years,  has a punkier urgency, again with galloping drums anchoring the keyboards haze, the album going back to their very first single with Acid Test (The Walls Are Closing In On Me), dip into retro psychedelia, and indie  that nods to The Chemical Brothers and  Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Initially intended a song of love and optimism before Smyth had a strop and turned it on its head, the penultimate It’s Gone Forever emerges from a wall of distorted noise and snarling synths for the drums and disembodied, distorted vocals to put their head down with a relentlessness that embodies the fury within. It ends, Floyd undertones again detected, with the swaggering riffery of Take Me To The Man in the wake of watching a documentary on the Jim Jonestown Massacre and Guy Ritchie’s  Snatch and looking to evoke the raw, spikey delirium of The Stooges I Wanna Be Your Dog.

The whole B-Town revival sparked by the likes of Swim Deep, Jaws and Peace has rather faded away over the past couple of years, but with this album Solar Eyes could well prove the phoenix from the ashes.

 

A taster for their next album, BLUEBYRD pay tribute  to their roots with the walking rhythm strumalong and harmonica self-released Black Country Towns  (“Like Black Country towns/That born and raised you/And where you lay down/You knew where you come from/And where you belonged”) which  also gives a nod to the heritage of the area (“A plaque in a burger bar/Lest we forget”) and the sense of it and local identity being being lost to progress (“They've buried our heroes/Under cable tv/Hidden our stories

So we can't see/Where we come from/Where we’re going to” and how  “in the big picture You mean nothing at all”.

MARC LEMON keeps them coming, except his latest, Oxford, (www.youtube.com/watch?v=26tLnaRx7t8), is a drums, organ and handclaps heavy instrumental, still with distorted fuzz garage and psychedelic 60s roots but inspired by listening to Sandy Nelson and bashed out on a  beaten up 1962 drum kit he got off eBay, the keyboards filtering   Booker T and the MGs  with Shadows Of Knight.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JANUARY 2024

Their name pretty much indicating their musical leanings, Americana duo CASH AND CARTER are Birmingham’s  Shaun Smith and London producer Ross O’Reilly, who, also inspired by the likes of The Eagles and the Steve Miller Band, release their debut  EP No Use Praying. Included are previous singles the punchy, drums-driven All Of The Way, the more reflective circling guitar framed Americana (Letting Her Go),  a tribute to a friend who took their own life, and the recent stripped back, slow and moody cover of The Cure’s Just Like Heaven recast as an atmospheric ballad with American South gothic overtones.

 

There’s two previously unreleased numbers, the brooding ebb and flow opening title track with its gospel undercurrents and hints of The Band and, staying down South, the more breathily sung narrative Ballad Of Tallulah where, with its don’t waste my time refrain,  you might hear echoes of The Lumineers.

Leading up to the new album, True Story, THE URBAN FOLK QUARTET release Coal Minin’ Man (SAE Records),   banjo maestro Dan Walsh on vocals, it’s a cover of a Ricky Skaggs bluegrass number written by Jim Mills which tells of a   miner who, recognising the toll the way of life has taken on him,   wishes more for his son, despite the inevitability that he’ll follow his father underground. While that had a strong Appalachian sound, the quartet’s arrangement, while having a strong banjo  riff, emphasises driving layered percussion with the rhythmic drive informed by funk and hip hop influences, the main drum groove emerging from jams based on the jazz influenced side of early-’00s hip hop. For advance orders and an early chance to hear the whole album visit https://theufq.com/true-story

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN DECEMBER 2023

Titled after a quote from Robert Burns used to describe the poverty he saw and recorded live on an iPhone, GARY O’DEA releases five minute new single Down on The Elbows  Of Existence with strummed 60s folk protest DNA, Dylan influences included, with its encouragement to “Get the kettle on the boil, wipe that frown off with a smile…darn your jeans, darn your luck and darn the rest to hell and back”. (https://garyodea-gojomusic.bandcamp.com/track/down-on-the-elbows-of-existence)

MARC LEMON digitally sees the year out with the infectious earworm jangly 60s psychedelia folksy pop My Eccentric Cousin (think The Kinks meet early Robyn Hitchcock by way of The Velvet Underground and perhaps, as James Lowe of The Electric Prunes once observed, Brian Wilson), written about his father’ second cousin Douglas, an English gent of the old school who smoke untipped fags, wore a tweed jacket and grey flannels  and whose esoteric book collection included the Bhagvad Gita, who shared a bachelor pad with his fellow retired architect pipe-smoking brother Kerris until the latter died peacefully in his chair. A tribute to a vanished breed of non-conformist English eccentrics who upheld values that have long fallen into neglect and one of the best things he’s recorded. (https://marclemon.com/)

 

Just putting the word out to flag up attention for CATCH THE RAIN, a Stourbridge close harmony quartet comprising music teacher Julia Disney (Vocals, Keyboard, Guitar, Violin), creative psychotherapist Odilia Mabrouk (Vocals, Violin, Guitar), visual artist Lisa Westwood (Vocals, Cajon, Djembe, Percussion, Kazoo) and gardener Jon Hazlewood (Electric Bass, Guitar). Formed last year they have a folksy base but the music also embraces  dreamy Laurel Canyon pop, classical touches, Eastern European shades and a wide spectrum of influences that variously encompass Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Jonny Flynn, Suzanne Vega, Glenn Miller, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Sinead O'Connor and Stevie Wonder. An EP is on the cards for sometime early 2024 but meanwhile they’ve released Tapestry, a five and half minute fiddle and piano driven waltzing Weimar cabaret and Balkan cocktail  with fairytale lyrics about the heart’s fateful tapestry. Potentially the most exciting new local name since The Lost Notes (https://www.facebook.com/CatchTheRainBand)

Their first new music since 2016 and a taster for next year’s new album, the URBAN FOLK QUARTET, comprising   Galician fiddle player Paloma Trigás, fiddle player/guitarist Joe Broughton, singer/banjo player Dan Walsh and percussionist Tom Chapman, have released a cover of long time set staple Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill (SAE Records), a   splendid  mountain music take with gentle percussion, strings and clawhammer banjo it’s also graced with a guest bass appearance from Fairport’s Dave Pegg.  The forthcoming album, True Story, will also feature  a guest contribution from Chris and Kellie While. (www.theufq.com) 

Theological agitator  and singer-songwriter, DAVID BENJAMIN BOWER takes time off from his Messianic Folklore podcast to release Kindness is Solid Stone Violence is a Heavy Loan to Pay (https://benjaminblower.bandcamp.com/album/kindness-is-solid-stone-violence-is-a-heavy-loan-to-pay) which might be best musically described as a cross between Beans On Toast and Hurt era Johnny Cash, a heady brew of philosophy, existentialism, benediction and protest.

Voice soaring on the refrain and guitar – and possibly mandolin - strummed, it kicks off with Finger In The Wind which has mountain music folk hints and prophetic end of days lyrics (“See the valleys lifted up/Rise, scum of the earth/See the mountains crashing down…All y'are as flowers and grass/Nations as handfuls of dust/All your princes brought to nought”). A steady marching drum beat and piano underpin the title track with its vision of a world of equality (“The way is like the rain that falls/And waters all regardless/The way is like the sun that rises/Upon enemies and others”) and that “there may come a day/And may the day be real/When the gentle shall raise their hands/And the proud will kneel”, the latter part of the title referring to the consequences of our actions (“someone pays for everything I break”).

Fingerpicked and punctuated by distant piano notes, Now We Gaze Into A Mirror again has dusty American hymnal folk notes to a simple lyric about an uncertain future  (“we gaze into a mirror dimly/Toward the unknown lands of knowing”) before a tribal drum thump rhythm and intermittent clanging percussion carries the compelling hypnotic  six-minute No Debts. No Masters. No Law. No Caesars, the title pretty much comprising the entirety of the lyrics along with the repeated refrain “Love fulfils it all/Love will be all in all” where thoughts of Iron & Wine, Mark Kozalek or  Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy might not go amiss.

Another simple folky, sparsely picked guitar number, The Rain Not the Thunder serves up a metaphor about how a whisper can be more effective than a scream as he sings “it’s the rain, not the thunder/That makes the flowers bloom” with its call to “join hands in the ring” suggesting ancient rituals. Opening a capella before guitar and dobro arrive  and the rhythm picks up, Gather Round The Table O My Enemies is a particularly striking number that sounds like some old time Appalachian preacher’s gospel (“I’ll pray for you all/As my cheeks run with oil/And make offerings by fire for your souls/I’ll pray that we all/May rest by quiet waters/In the goodness and the mercy of the age”) with its prayer “O god of our gladness/O god of our madness and our grief/Care for our bodies/O god of our enemies/O god of our wandering feet”. 

That same quality extends to the cracked vocals of  Empty Thyselves  that returns to the theme of  humility, love and equality (“Think not thyself to be more than thou art/And judge thyself with courageous heart/Greet ye everyone with honour/And love ye, always, love one another”),  the only track to have a specific religious note (“in God’s love may your minds be remade/And empty thyself as an offering”) in its Desiderata-styled prescription for a good life (“Rejoice with those who now rejoice/And weep with those who speak with broken voice/So far as you may be at peace with all/Stand alongside those of no report…Never avenge offence for offence/Pay back your enemies with love, my friends/May your prayers resound in all that you do/Welcome saint and welcome strangers too/May your prayers be wound of many a threat/And evil overcome with good”).

 Just over 80 seconds with again just minimal acoustic guitar backing, Meet Me Where I Sing And Stamp My Feet heads to the end with its call for shared communion, troubles and jubilation (“Meet me in the temple of my heart…Meet me in the sorrows of the night/Meet me in the troubles of my days/Walk with me through the times of wilderness and pain/Meet me where my prayers arise again… Let us be in love and cry and sing and laugh until the dawn/Meet me in the tavern of my dreams”).

The lyrics  again pretty much comprising of just the staccato title, it ends with the pulsing percussive drone and reverberating deep plangent piano notes of the almost ethereal Covers. Believes. Holds. Stays., a final hillside chapel-like hymnal blessing of an all-encompassing peace and assurance.  It might not reach the wide audience it deserves, but this is one of the finest old school Americana folk albums of the year.