Tuesday 1 October 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN OCTOBER 2024



Featuring bassist Simon Smyth, the founder of The Smyths tribute band and fronted by singer James Schofield, TV PINS are a 5-piece from London and the West Midlands, bringing a British  edge to the sound of West coast Americana, filtering influences such as Supertramp and Crowded House through 70 Americana. Riding a  chugging guitar rhythm, new single Daisy Saturday Night, a taster or their forthcoming album, Aircutter, is a catchy alt-pop ode to  festival goers, old school ravers, and people who refuse to grow old and is quite likely named for guitarist Duncan O’Neill’s wife.

 


Now based in Bristol, folk instrumental duo THORPE & MORRISON self-release their third album, Grass & Granite, the title a reference to fiddle player Sean (Morrison) and guitarist Harry’s (Thorpe) countryside upbringings in Ayrshire and   Suffolk and their former adopted home in Birmingham (the cover also shows a house carved into the standing stones in the Outer Hebrides from whence Sean’s grandfather came) and reflecting the pastoral and industrial aspects of their sound. Taking in traditional English, Scottish and Irish tunes as well as self-penned material, it’s a glowing testament to their musicianship and virtuosity drawing on themes that explore both longings for home and moving on to new experiences, the lively opener, Big Skies & Water Meadows (which incorporates Damien O’Kane’s Castle Rock Road), an invocation of the landscape where Harry was raised in a cottage beside a water meadow. 

Original numbers also include his more ruminative fingerpicked Something New written for friends embarking on journeys into the unknown, the fiddle-led Coast To Coast inspired by the journey of two friends across America, the one proposing to the other on reaching their destination, while a jazzy pizzicato fingerpicked and dancing fiddle Merlin the Wolfhound relates to an overly amorous, Guinness-drinking Irish wolfhound and , continuing the playfulness, the rhythmically choppy Claudette’s Last Dance is a fond farewell to the duo’s faithful Peugeot.

On the trad front, there’s the self-descriptive Wedding Marches, a pairing of two Danish tunes, the fiddle pulsing Causeway Joy, inspired by the Outer Hebrides and combining The Oysters Wives Rant and Ales Engelska by Danish cittern player Ale Carr, with Scottish slow air lament Put The Gown Upon The Bishop closing up shop.  There’s three vocal tracks, two traditional, The Girl I Left Behind Me (incorporating two fiddle reels), Sovay, sung by Michelle Holloway from Bonfire Radicals, and rounded off with Sean’s Gizmo’s Tunes, and a slow waltzing cover of The Pogues’ Rainy Night In Soho with plucked and bowed fiddle. They’ve been gradually building a hefty reputation on the folk circuit over the past five years, this firmly cements them in the major leagues.



Fronted by the recently joined Tilly Clarke on vocals, TILLY & THE DROLLS are a Moseley-based quintet whose music encompasses rock, jazz, blues and folk (their covers range from Wade In The Water to I Run, Seven Nation Army and Valerie), the latter being the case for the marching beat, vocally soaring anthemic new single The View From My Window (Second Glances) featuring some fine, muscular guitar work from Steve Ashby.  

Wednesday 4 September 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN SEPTEMBER 2024



Based in London but with Birmingham roots, KEO are a post-grunge four-piece anchored around Anglo-Irish brothers Finn, on vocals and rhythm guitar  and bassist Conor Keogh, the sons of Dave Keogh (Kehoe) well-known to 80s BrumBeat readers as the frontman of the much undervalued Surf Drums (check out These Seven Years at www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Y7EaLPCGw) and now author of Accidental Gangster , a  series of books on his late legendary club owner (Barbarellas, Rebeccas, The Cedar Club, Eddie’s) father-in-law Eddie Fewtrell. Though not following in his jangly guitar footsteps, with its circling guitar line, quivering, husky vocals and  slow and steady drumbeat new single Crow, an emotive number written by Finn when a family member was suffering from cancer and about his fear of losing them (“I’d rather watch you and bleed / I’d rather cry over me”). (www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-Wr5giWag)


MARC LEMON
continues to mine a successful seam of lo fi 60s psychedelia pop on Crystal Falls And Shatters with its echoes of Syd Barrett, the Velvets and The Soft Boys, the track, recorded in one take, a response  to the current xenophobic state of the western world as he sings “I pity you in your servitude/And now that I myself am free/I'll never hate you as much as you hate me”. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf_KZ6yU7rM)


WILLIAM WILLIAM ROGERS
has found something else to sing other than the Yellow Pages, Hot House being his jangly Morrissey meets 70s folk new single and a taster for upcoming album Pond Life. Featuring   bass, drums and organ, it’s a perspective and age shifting wry reverie of a schoolboy summer  when “Semen spilled in the goosegrass” and Wolverhampton was “sizzling like Hanging Rock” and, while getting “an F in hard knocks” a dream that “one of these days/You're gonna smash all the clocks” and “one of these days/I'm gonna burn all the maps”.  


LITTLE JUKE
are a new West Mids four piece comprising   Alex Ohm on  guitar and vocals, bassist Hannah Maiden, guitarist Stephen Ashford and Tom Crowson on drums, their debut release being ‘Down The Rabbit Hole’, a dreamy, cinematic mingling of folktronic and indie that opens with nervy piano and airy psych vocals before pattering drums and guitar arrive, the track building in power and intensity as it reaches its strings-enrobed finale. Impressive stuff, if they’ve more like this, 2025 could see them making substantial strides.


Monday 5 August 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN AUGUST 2024

 



While he never had the high profile solo career promised by his 1985 debut album Dangerous Music and Journey-esque minor hit single Heartline, or indeed his heartthrob good looks reminiscent of the young Rick Derringer, Wolverhampton-born ROBIN GEORGE went on to earn an illustrious reputation as sideman guitar with the likes of David Byron, Phil Lynott, Robert Plant, Magnum and Glenn Hughes. He sadly passed in April, but now has a posthumous release with   VIX FUZZBOX (whose solo album You he co-wrote and produced) playing and singing  on his final project, the utterly infectious upbeat summer anthem that is Summertime Reggae Rule (Sing Song Records), also coming in Swing and Acoustic Electric mixes with the video on  www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0cSshi4toQ. Utterly atypical of the music he was known for, but a celebration of life and living that deserves to afford him the belated send-off he deserves.


Friday 19 July 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JULY 2024

 



From Birmingham but currently seeking  fame and fortune in London, LILY CLARKE  makes her debut with the self-released  The City (www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzDyvdDkAkk),  an essentially simple but structurally complex number with strummed acoustic guitar backdropped by sound samples (train, seagulls), muted drums and what sounds like woodwinds that speaks of insecurity (“I wanna be someone else most days”), lack of a sense of purpose and the need for someone to lean on (“when I feel like nothing you’re the stableness I know”). It’s already picked up several very positive online reviews as well as a BrumRadio  Track Of The Week, so definitely a name to keep an eye on. (www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082586691322



Mixing, mastering and playing everything himself, Castle Bromwich-born  LUCA SIMIAN wrote his new  single Waving Goodbye  back in 2022 but it stayed gathering dust until it started getting solid reactions at live shows. So, he wisely resurrected it, the track, a delicate simply strummed ballad of offering support in dark times with spare piano notes that warrants favourable comparisons to Damien Rice. He started making music when he was 8, making his debut album, Hummingbird, when he was just 14. He’s now 18, has played two sell out O2 Birmingham shows and does a damn fine version of Elvis’s Little Sister. Expect great things by the time he’s 21.


Monday 10 June 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JUNE 2024

 




MARC LEMON
returns with another ace excursion into echoey, reverb-lashed guitars American 60s pop with How Many Thousand Times (“did I end up where I started from”) that more than earns an honorary place on any Nuggets compilation.  (www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRMspyPcgk4) 



Good news that the GERRY COLVIN BAND has a label deal with Crocodile Records for his  two upcoming albums, Past Present and Crescent (live tracks from the theatre show and new numbers) and Last Christmas Needle, meanwhile  there’s a fourteen track remixed compilation titled Johnny Cash Shirt, the title track now featuring  harp player Billy Jay and   train rolling bookends.

The compilation, curated by Crocodile, ranges across Colvin Quarmby and the Gerry Colvin Band and, for those who’ve not yet discovered him (and longtime fans wanting refresher),  offers a  handy introduction to the variety and quality of his songwriting, not to mention how effectively he puts a song over. It opens with the title track followed by The Bell off Back & Forth, the same album also yielding the achingly plaintive, fingerpicked bruised heart of  The Man She Left You For, the transcendentally  exquisite Watching Feathers Fall and a live take of their show staple closer One More Week (originally on Colvin Quarmby’s A Short Walk To the Red Lion), all with Trish Power, Lyndon Webb, Michael Keelan and Jerome Davies.

The line-up also features on the circling fingerpicked loveliness of My Country  and the hard scrabble Rainbow Season from Six Of One Half A Dozen Of The Other as well as Clown Shoes (a jaunty song about county lines) and Paranoid from Fully Functioning Windup Mechanism. 

Delving back into Colin Quarmby days, you get The Ocean, Go And Ask Somebody Else   and I Look The Same But I Have Changed off A Short Walk To the Red Lion and the vaguely bluegrassy A Rival from Town  And Country Times, the collection completed by the emotionally powerful Broken Man from QVC with Marion Fleetwood on violin and a radio interview with Billy Jay who presents  a show on Ferndale Community Radio in Plymouth.  The Gerry Colvin Band play Stratford on Avon Playhouse on Nov 16 featuring the reunion of female backing trio Asia Blue.



Forty-five years since she made her recording debut, TOYAH continues to be a significant musical force, balancing nostalgia-based shows with new material that underscores her unique sound and stylings. Having scored another Top 30 album in 2021 with Posh Pop she returns now with new single Roses In Chain, co-written with longtime collaborator  Simon Darlow  and featuring husband Robert Fripp providing signature guitar to the production. A song that explores the   intensity of relationships, it has a suitably driving, implacable marching rhythm of almost Floydian feel  underpinning her distinctive vocals and the flourishes of rumbling prog-rock before stripping everything back for the just bare piano unaccompanied final seconds.


Thursday 2 May 2024

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?


Thursday 7 March 2024

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 OCTOBER 2024

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