MIKE DAVIES COLUMN APRIL 2023

Sporting an Orbison hairdo and shades, MARC LEMON keeps them coming, his latest up on YouTube being the reverb heavy, Velvets/Syd Barrett-influenced shoegaze chug of Lighthouse, an ode to a visionary and rebel  (“they say that your ideas are an anachronism to the thinking classes/They are sheep to be sheared/Much of what you've said and done reveals a deeper truth/One they have obscured but you have made clear”) that uses an image of a rusty Ford Corsair as a metaphor for society (“A fragile entity you work to save/Are both beyond repair”). (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUqw8T6wWmA)

Recording as SHY FACE TROUBADOUR, singer-songwriter Tony Willé self-releases ‘The Train’, a folksy Americana piano and guitar ballad about the loss of his brother some years back, a musing on the previous nature of time and the realisation that when it’s up then the train is never late and “all our tears and prayers couldn’t slow it down”, the lyrics managing to reference not only The Rolling Stones but Mickey Channon, who played forward for  Southampton, and represented the England national team in the 70s, scoring over 250 goals alongside the poignant refrain “I don’t have a religious bone in my body but I believe in love”. (www.shyfacetroubadour.bandcamp.com)

Awash with drones and interlaced with readings adapted from the Bible, The Book of Bare Life & Returns - Full Liturgical Edition, subtitled  Praying the Psalms in the Anthropocene  (the time during which humans have had a substantial impact on our planet),  is the latest from  DAVID BENJAMIN BLOWER, one he describes as “songs based on psalms, deep time, anarchy, the agricultural revolution, the domestication of the horse, the industrial revolution, oil, walls, ruins, wilds, kindness, wine, waiting, and the dreadful otherness of god”.

It opens with To and End, a  drone and spare guitar accompanied ode to mortality and the peace of accepting sung like an old work song blues,  moving into the sparse plucked accompaniment of the eco-apocalypse prophesying Sing O Hills (“Let the hills sing the song they have been keeping/And the waters clap their fierce ancient hands/Let the hills sing the song that’s down there sleeping/Because its coming”) and followed by the eight-minute Happy Be They, a prayer for the downtrodden and lost (“Oh harken to our hurt/Behold and enfold/The worn out faces of the earth”) and the peace of those who “know ye’in the warmth of the sun and the soil”.

Six  tracks are spoken passages set to atmospheric instrumental backing, varying from 50 seconds to the four minute early dawn purity of Ascents, while elsewhere the semi-slurred The Earth is Full (“Break all the ceilings to the floors/Let all things be silenced and stilled in awe/Hear the wind my Loves/Know ye the Fear upon the heights/Know all the stars beyond the whirring lights/Light your prayers my friends”) is what Beans On Toasts might sound like had he trained in canonical singing with lines such as “The Kings shall not be saved by all their wars/Nor armies saved by all their saddled horses” very much of an Old Testament persuasion.

Eco themes and exploitation of the earth are present again on the slow and measured plucked rhythm and echoing vocals of  A River (“If the black gold burns/And the wheel yet turns/And the States keeps friends/Who pillage in their violence”), continuing in the quasi-lullaby reassurance of The Gentle Strong (“Fret ye not, little heart/At the wheels that want and take and hurt/O forsake their heartless rage/For the wheels shall all lay down and be covered in moss/And the trees shall take back all their walls/And the gentle strong shall inherit the land”), one repeated with Why So Sad? (“These wastelands have an end/Ye shall praise again”) in its call to remember the joy before the despair (“I remember/Walking midst the crowds in the streets/All toward the house with dancing feet/And the procession was all/All’s a festival”) that would seem to have its roots in the idea of the Second Coming.

Calling Billy Bragg to mind, the tranquil and quite lovely The Knowing with its pulsing rhythm and intermittent piano notes is another eight-minute piece, here about finding peace in trust in the “song of the God-in-love”  (“With the wine that flows down the mountainside/And every creature eats from the loving hand/And every creature rests on the loving breast”), again calling out the despoliation of the land (“wherefore this butchering the soil?/So may it perish from the earth”). The final ‘song’ being the chiming notes of the sparsely accompanied Unholy States, a blessing that speaks to a rebirth of nature: “Resting bodies where the dwellings are singing/Bow thee low to meet the clear spring/Unmake the walled unholy states/Open up the goats’ lonely gates/Blessed be the soil that creates and waits”. It comes with a short essay (physical with the CD, pdf with the Bandcamp digital) on the Psalms, the Anthropocene and Doughnut Economics. Blower may be a theologian, but you don’t have to be of any religious persuasion to appreciate the beauty of his words and music, but it might help if you share his concern for the fate of the planet.

From Haiti via America and now living in Birmingham, Creole singer-songwriter GERMA ADAN has self-released ‘The Women Of Dan’, watery blues-folk guitar accompanying her softly sung vocals on lyrics taken from Audre Lorde's poem The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors, a celebration of the female warriors of Dahomey as featured in the film The Woman King. (www.adanproject.com/about-me).

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2023

FYFE DANGERFIELD resurfaces after a long absence with new track and video Shook, a drum-led slow march beat  rhythm festooned with electronic beeps and squiggles on which he furtively sings “call me Shook/what are you?” like something out of a creepy children’s story that circles enigmatically around a theme of loss of identity (“i got so involved in your ghost stories/now i can’t even see the path before me”) and mental health (“richter scale anxiety/what the hell’s become of me?”)

Following her recent album using just unaccompanied treated and layered vocals, KATY ROSE BENNETT goes full on experimental   with the sonic manipulations of Dissolution created as part of her time as one of Drake Music’s Artists-in-Residence, a musical journey through grief and loss, to understanding that’s might be described as Bjork and Radiohead filtered through a Laurie Anderson lens and the work of Stockhausen. Constructed entirely from samples of Katy’s voice, looped, layered and sonically manipulated to emulate percussion, converting lyric texts into midi keyboard patterns mapped to vocal samples,  it comprises five parts, each representing a stage of the grieving process, based on the Kubler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She reflects on the grief experienced resulting from Functional Neurological Disorder, a disabling, long-term health condition, and the consequential sense of loss of identity and potential.

As you might assume, it’s not one for the car stereo, but requires full immersion to appreciate the nuances and indeed the wry humour evident in lines like “what if I eat more spinach, what if I eat more fish, what if I drink more water, what if I drink less gin” on Dissolution III. It opens with a  disorienting soundscape, revisited on the eight-minute Part IV and closes with the choral/hymnal-like tranquillity of the seven-minute Dissolution V. About as far as you could get from her Songs Of The River Rea, it’s a bold journey into unknown waters and astounding evidence of her progression of an artist not afraid to take chances in the pursuit of her music. 

Now settled into Bolan spelling mode, MARC LEMON turns is focus to the plight of the homeless , mental health  and depression in the simply strummed  Night Shelter, a song written from a dark place with the title carrying a bitter  irony (“the gentle cloak of death”), the track ending with a children’s chorus singing Silent Night (www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvxNcrChDLw)