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.
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.
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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/
