Earlier this year, the punningly named THE MISSED TREES, alt-folk duo Joe Peacock on guiar and violinist Louisa Davies-Foley, released Animals an EP which featured songs about Dian (Fosse) of Gorillas In The Mist fame, Sacrificial Bees (about a colony painted gold found in a church), and Big Mary, the incredible but true story of how, in the late 19th century, a huge circus elephant that killed the keeper who mistreated her was lynched from a crane by a smalltown Tennessee mob. They follow that with Resist, another three tracker this time with a protest theme.
Sparsely strummed, Guilty Bystanders tells the story of Jamaican-born Olive Morris who, in 1969, saw Nigerian diplomat Clement Gomwalk being confronted by Metropolitan Police officers while parked outside Desmond's Hip City, the first black record shop in Brixton and questioned him under the "sus law". As things got physical, Morris pushed through the crowd and attempted to stop the police hitting him, resulting in her being arrested and, taunted for her appearance on account of looking like a boy on account her short hair, beaten in police custody with the result that “Her brother could hardly tell it was her face”, leading her to become a Marxist activist and feminist. As the song says, “We need to be more like Olive Morris/When they’re trampling on our rights”.
Sung by Joe, the fingerpicked Little Boats addresses refuges and, evoking the Tory rhetoric in ‘invaders’, the inevitable tendency to look for scapegoats when things get tough “Stirring up feelings that we should be ashamed of” as we “close the borders while children are drowned”, sagely noting that “bad guys come in private jets not little boats” , avoiding paying taxes while greasing politicians’ palms.
Partly sung in Russian, with violin accompanying the guitar, Bunkernyy ded translates as Bunker grandpa, a nickname given Putin, here “Sitting in his golden bunker permanently scared/That someone’s going to assassinate him”. Suffice to say, they’re not empathising.
Channelling the reverb-heavy acid-fuzzed shoegaze of the Jesus & Mary Chain and a dose of Spector Wall of Sound and ELO orchestral sweeps, SOLAR EYES. aka Glenn Smyth and Sebastian Maynard Francis, tease their February album with Top Of The World, a cosmic euphoria that should see their airplay profile soaring.
