MICHELLE LAWRENCE continues on the comeback trail with Keep Falling Down (www.michellelawrencemusic.com), a terrific gospel-flavoured slow swaying soul love story that makes you wonder why she’s not spoken of in the same breath as Ruby Turner and Beverley Knight.
Having placed plans for a seven-track mini-album on hold, feeling the material didn’t have enough variety, FYFE DANGERFIELD returns with SFJ (invent your own acronym), a track that, with its rippling keyboards and distant largely indecipherable choral vocals, might be best described as progressive classical , available through the usual streaming channels and with a video on www.youtube.com/watch?v=
MARC LEMON is positively churning them out, following up his Carry On tribute with Psychodrama (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNeJ_yLq3Ig(a number he describes as “the fallout from a catastrophic relationship…If they happen to be friends with, or be in love with, a certain type of person, well, there's going to be a horrible price to pay and this is why I say to you, be careful”. With distorted guitars, a Motown influenced groove and ferocious Ringo Starr drumming, it channels 60s psychedelic jangle rock through the fuzzed acid haze of the Jesus & Mary Chain and a T Rex strut.
The third album from BLUEBYRD, the Wolverhampton acoustic duo of Graham Pask and Chris Rowley, Song and Dance offers ample evidence as to why they are increasingly proving staples on the festival and folk club circuit, opening with the light fingerpicking of the title track with its carpe diem message (“The day's too short to stare at the horizon/Waiting for your ship to come in/Placing safe bets at the table/On a game you can never lose or win”) about taking risks and living for the moment (“You’ve got to dance like there’s no tomorrow/Sing the song like you just don’t care/'Cause when the day is done/At the setting sun/We disappear”)
The shimmering woodwind-shaded, fingerpicked ‘Crystals’ follows, hints of Ralph McTell
to a song about a woman who, “when the world just isn’t right/When we’re too scared to think” finds strength, solace and something to hold on to through her belief in the power of crystals. Keeping things low key, ‘Siren Song’ takes the familiar myth of sailors being lured to their destruction by watery femme fatales but gives it a spin whereby the temptress becomes music (“Don’t blame me, it was the tune, blame it on the band/They just plugged and struck this chord it took me by the hand/I couldn't stop , I had to join, I had to play along”), weaving in touch of the pied piper as they warn “Parents lock your kids away plug wax into their ears/Do not let them hear the song that robs you of your years/For once they taste this fruit your children's souls will belong/To those who play and dance and sing to the siren's song”, all of which seems rather counter-productive for a working musician to advocate.
Music continues to cast a spell with ‘Sing Me The Song’, a spare traditional-sounding fingerpicked web of circling watery, dark notes that, this time, speaks of its healing power (“Sing me the song that will make me sleep tonight…Give me the tune that will take me by the hand/Pull me from the sea/Rest me on the sand/Rail at those roarers then steer me inland… the hymn that makes the ache in our hearts end”) and which put me in mind of 70s duo Magna Carta.
Fluttering synthesised accordion introduces ‘Where Does the River Flow?’ which, starting out gentle and rippling picks up pace for a light skip and catchy refrain that echoes the earlier theme of not trying to second guess what lies ahead (“So take your tarot cards/And hide them in the back yard… And don’t give me predictions/About some dirt track to perdition/The fool's always got the most to say”), relying on each other to weather the storms (“We don’t know what’s coming next/So why can’t we just be?”). From rivers to a ‘Rock Pool’, things shift into a bossa nova groove for a number about the calming balm of nature that, in contrast to seizing the day, looks to while it away in tranquillity as “A troubled world/Is kept at bay/As I rest inside your dappled drowsy spell”.
With its cascading guitar figures and synth-accordion break, ‘Babe It's Me And You’ pretty much speaks for itself, in a song about trying to keep a relationship from falling apart (“There, you sit away from me/We may be worlds apart/But this thing will be through/So listen to your heart/We both know what is true”) returning again to musical motifs with “We know the song remains the same/So we won’t change the chords/Or add some dumb refrain/This harmony’s for two/For us to rehearse through”.
Staying together is also at the heart of the dappled fingerpicked, Beatles-referencing, organ-shaded ‘I Ain't Got a Ticket to Ride’ (“When you wake up in the morning it will still be me that you’re lying beside/I forgot to draw up a master plan/I just crashed out on your sofa, woke up in the morning and here I still am”) and, again, not losing what you have by forever searching for what’s over the horizon (“Hey don’t you dream of all those ‘could be’s’/Forget the journeys that you never made/The grass is never really greener /They’re filtered lives that trick the eye to thinking you ain’t made the grade”).
‘The Bridge’ takes on a darker hue where the musical phrase ‘take me to the bridge’ is recast in the story of a man whose mind’s a “broken highway, beyond repair”, looking to commit suicide feeling that “When the time is right you gotta throw in the hat”, when even his death will just “inconvenience the 9.15” while passers-by are too busy to try and stop him (“I could have talked him out of it/But I had to catch my train”). I’ll leave the song to reveal how his story ends.
Another shift of subject matter, ‘Stanton Drew’ with its puttering percussion is about Somerset’s mysterious stone monoliths but also returns to the same notions of stillness and serenity explored in ‘Rock Pool’ and also of love’s permanence (“if I had just one more day/
I would spend it here time wasting with you/And if I could change just one thing/I'd change to stone/Become still/Never to move”).
The penultimate ‘Too Much Noise’ laments the online world’s attention deficit disorder where the constant buzz “banging in our heads” drowns out the poet’s rhymes, the singer’s songs, the writer's prose, the preacher's prayer, the angel's voice, again looking for a place to which to retreat (“I like it here in my home/I like it here in my room/I like it here in my chair/
I like it here in my head”). It ends with the brief circular fingerpicked 'Lost', a downbeat meditation on those who are, as it says, lost amid the noise and darkness, always seeking to blame and easily distracted by smoke and mirrors (“Pay the money/See the show/Go home”).
Five years on from their debut, they’ve grown into a hugely accomplished folk force and, while they may not stray far outside their restrained acoustic parameters and the echoes of their influences, this is a hugely listenable album that fully deserves to expand awareness and following as it filters out into the world. (www.bluebyrdband.co.uk)
