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)



Wednesday 31 January 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN FEBRUARY 2024



Comprising Glenn Smyth and Sebastian Maynard Francis, Tom Ford having moved out of the area, psych/pop duo SOLAR EYES make their eponymous Fierce Panda album debut in persuasive manner opening with synthesized wailing sirens before distorted vocals,  spaghetti  Western guitar riff and driving drums breach the walls, riding a stroboscopic rhythm for Alcatraz, a number inspired by both feeling trapped in a stormy relationship,  his other half holding the keys to the cell,  and Smyth having watched the old Clint Eastwood film Escape from Alcatraz. 

The track fades away but, early Primal Scream giving way to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club,  the intensity continues with Roll The Dice, a number about having a go and believing in yourself, and damn what others think. Written in Texas and infused with  desert atmospherics, the urgent, echoing vocals Let’s Run Way again conjures a Spaghetti western vibe with a darkness that feels like Amigo The Devil on amphetamines, described by Smyth as Fast Car with a Brummie slant, inspired by small-town tales of daylight robberies in times of old and tales of the last crimes of   Bonnie and Clyde.

 


The title of Deep Trip gives a fair idea of where it’s at musically, a slow narcotic swirl  with a Pink Floyd feel and inspired by a scene in the second series of True Detective that dissolves into a psych guitar finale. On then to the cosmic warbling intro to Bulldozer before it explodes into another strobe rhythm with distorted vocals and driving drums, the song designed to capture the turbulent feelings and excitement of newfound love.

They reach the mid-point with Dreaming of The Moon, a sort of ELO meets spaghetti Western ballad set on the moon with its reverb guitars and tumbling drums, Smyth in semi-falsetto vocal mode. A definite album standout.  As is, channelling The Ronettes via The Jesus and Mary Chain, On Top of the World, a revisiting of an old song he recorded back in 2014 with producer/engineer David McCabe and which, featuring female vocals, was used on various TV shows

And from old to brand new with She Kissed The Gun which keeps the Spector link taking the title from what he allegedly told police on his arrest, the slow prowling track, however, being decidedly more heady, Bowie-informed, dark space rock. (At Least) Paranoia Loves You, written about someone Smyth had to put up with for years,  has a punkier urgency, again with galloping drums anchoring the keyboards haze, the album going back to their very first single with Acid Test (The Walls Are Closing In On Me), dip into retro psychedelia, and indie  that nods to The Chemical Brothers and  Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Initially intended a song of love and optimism before Smyth had a strop and turned it on its head, the penultimate It’s Gone Forever emerges from a wall of distorted noise and snarling synths for the drums and disembodied, distorted vocals to put their head down with a relentlessness that embodies the fury within. It ends, Floyd undertones again detected, with the swaggering riffery of Take Me To The Man in the wake of watching a documentary on the Jim Jonestown Massacre and Guy Ritchie’s  Snatch and looking to evoke the raw, spikey delirium of The Stooges I Wanna Be Your Dog.

The whole B-Town revival sparked by the likes of Swim Deep, Jaws and Peace has rather faded away over the past couple of years, but with this album Solar Eyes could well prove the phoenix from the ashes.


 


A taster for their next album, BLUEBYRD pay tribute  to their roots with the walking rhythm strumalong and harmonica self-released Black Country Towns  (“Like Black Country towns/That born and raised you/And where you lay down/You knew where you come from/And where you belonged”) which  also gives a nod to the heritage of the area (“A plaque in a burger bar/Lest we forget”) and the sense of it and local identity being being lost to progress (“They've buried our heroes/Under cable tv/Hidden our stories

So we can't see/Where we come from/Where we’re going to” and how  “in the big picture You mean nothing at all”.



MARC LEMON
keeps them coming, except his latest, Oxford, (www.youtube.com/watch?v=26tLnaRx7t8), is a drums, organ and handclaps heavy instrumental, still with distorted fuzz garage and psychedelic 60s roots but inspired by listening to Sandy Nelson and bashed out on a  beaten up 1962 drum kit he got off eBay, the keyboards filtering   Booker T and the MGs  with Shadows Of Knight.


Tuesday 2 January 2024

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JANUARY 2024





Their name pretty much indicating their musical leanings, Americana duo CASH AND CARTER are Birmingham’s  Shaun Smith and London producer Ross O’Reilly, who, also inspired by the likes of The Eagles and the Steve Miller Band, release their debut  EP No Use Praying. Included are previous singles the punchy, drums-driven All Of The Way, the more reflective circling guitar framed Americana (Letting Her Go),  a tribute to a friend who took their own life, and the recent stripped back, slow and moody cover of The Cure’s Just Like Heaven recast as an atmospheric ballad with American South gothic overtones.

 


There’s two previously unreleased numbers, the brooding ebb and flow opening title track with its gospel undercurrents and hints of The Band and, staying down South, the more breathily sung narrative Ballad Of Tallulah where, with its don’t waste my time refrain,  you might hear echoes of The Lumineers.



Leading up to the new album, True Story, THE URBAN FOLK QUARTET release Coal Minin’ Man (SAE Records),   banjo maestro Dan Walsh on vocals, it’s a cover of a Ricky Skaggs bluegrass number written by Jim Mills which tells of a   miner who, recognising the toll the way of life has taken on him,   wishes more for his son, despite the inevitability that he’ll follow his father underground. While that had a strong Appalachian sound, the quartet’s arrangement, while having a strong banjo  riff, emphasises driving layered percussion with the rhythmic drive informed by funk and hip hop influences, the main drum groove emerging from jams based on the jazz influenced side of early-’00s hip hop. For advance orders and an early chance to hear the whole album visit https://theufq.com/true-story


Tuesday 28 November 2023

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN DECEMBER 2023



Titled after a quote from Robert Burns used to describe the poverty he saw and recorded live on an iPhone, GARY O’DEA releases five minute new single Down on The Elbows  Of Existence with strummed 60s folk protest DNA, Dylan influences included, with its encouragement to “Get the kettle on the boil, wipe that frown off with a smile…darn your jeans, darn your luck and darn the rest to hell and back”. (https://garyodea-gojomusic.bandcamp.com/track/down-on-the-elbows-of-existence)


MARC LEMON
digitally sees the year out with the infectious earworm jangly 60s psychedelia folksy pop My Eccentric Cousin (think The Kinks meet early Robyn Hitchcock by way of The Velvet Underground and perhaps, as James Lowe of The Electric Prunes once observed, Brian Wilson), written about his father’ second cousin Douglas, an English gent of the old school who smoke untipped fags, wore a tweed jacket and grey flannels  and whose esoteric book collection included the Bhagvad Gita, who shared a bachelor pad with his fellow retired architect pipe-smoking brother Kerris until the latter died peacefully in his chair. A tribute to a vanished breed of non-conformist English eccentrics who upheld values that have long fallen into neglect and one of the best things he’s recorded. (https://marclemon.com/)

 


Just putting the word out to flag up attention for CATCH THE RAIN, a Stourbridge close harmony quartet comprising music teacher Julia Disney (Vocals, Keyboard, Guitar, Violin), creative psychotherapist Odilia Mabrouk (Vocals, Violin, Guitar), visual artist Lisa Westwood (Vocals, Cajon, Djembe, Percussion, Kazoo) and gardener Jon Hazlewood (Electric Bass, Guitar). Formed last year they have a folksy base but the music also embraces  dreamy Laurel Canyon pop, classical touches, Eastern European shades and a wide spectrum of influences that variously encompass Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Jonny Flynn, Suzanne Vega, Glenn Miller, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Sinead O'Connor and Stevie Wonder. An EP is on the cards for sometime early 2024 but meanwhile they’ve released Tapestry, a five and half minute fiddle and piano driven waltzing Weimar cabaret and Balkan cocktail  with fairytale lyrics about the heart’s fateful tapestry. Potentially the most exciting new local name since The Lost Notes (https://www.facebook.com/CatchTheRainBand)


Their first new music since 2016 and a taster for next year’s new album, the URBAN FOLK QUARTET, comprising   Galician fiddle player Paloma Trigás, fiddle player/guitarist Joe Broughton, singer/banjo player Dan Walsh and percussionist Tom Chapman, have released a cover of long time set staple Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill (SAE Records), a   splendid  mountain music take with gentle percussion, strings and clawhammer banjo it’s also graced with a guest bass appearance from Fairport’s Dave Pegg.  The forthcoming album, True Story, will also feature  a guest contribution from Chris and Kellie While. (www.theufq.com


Theological agitator  and singer-songwriter, DAVID BENJAMIN BOWER takes time off from his Messianic Folklore podcast to release Kindness is Solid Stone Violence is a Heavy Loan to Pay (https://benjaminblower.bandcamp.com/album/kindness-is-solid-stone-violence-is-a-heavy-loan-to-pay) which might be best musically described as a cross between Beans On Toast and Hurt era Johnny Cash, a heady brew of philosophy, existentialism, benediction and protest.

Voice soaring on the refrain and guitar – and possibly mandolin - strummed, it kicks off with Finger In The Wind which has mountain music folk hints and prophetic end of days lyrics (“See the valleys lifted up/Rise, scum of the earth/See the mountains crashing down…All y'are as flowers and grass/Nations as handfuls of dust/All your princes brought to nought”). A steady marching drum beat and piano underpin the title track with its vision of a world of equality (“The way is like the rain that falls/And waters all regardless/The way is like the sun that rises/Upon enemies and others”) and that “there may come a day/And may the day be real/When the gentle shall raise their hands/And the proud will kneel”, the latter part of the title referring to the consequences of our actions (“someone pays for everything I break”).

Fingerpicked and punctuated by distant piano notes, Now We Gaze Into A Mirror again has dusty American hymnal folk notes to a simple lyric about an uncertain future  (“we gaze into a mirror dimly/Toward the unknown lands of knowing”) before a tribal drum thump rhythm and intermittent clanging percussion carries the compelling hypnotic  six-minute No Debts. No Masters. No Law. No Caesars, the title pretty much comprising the entirety of the lyrics along with the repeated refrain “Love fulfils it all/Love will be all in all” where thoughts of Iron & Wine, Mark Kozalek or  Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy might not go amiss.

Another simple folky, sparsely picked guitar number, The Rain Not the Thunder serves up a metaphor about how a whisper can be more effective than a scream as he sings “it’s the rain, not the thunder/That makes the flowers bloom” with its call to “join hands in the ring” suggesting ancient rituals. Opening a capella before guitar and dobro arrive  and the rhythm picks up, Gather Round The Table O My Enemies is a particularly striking number that sounds like some old time Appalachian preacher’s gospel (“I’ll pray for you all/As my cheeks run with oil/And make offerings by fire for your souls/I’ll pray that we all/May rest by quiet waters/In the goodness and the mercy of the age”) with its prayer “O god of our gladness/O god of our madness and our grief/Care for our bodies/O god of our enemies/O god of our wandering feet”. 

That same quality extends to the cracked vocals of  Empty Thyselves  that returns to the theme of  humility, love and equality (“Think not thyself to be more than thou art/And judge thyself with courageous heart/Greet ye everyone with honour/And love ye, always, love one another”),  the only track to have a specific religious note (“in God’s love may your minds be remade/And empty thyself as an offering”) in its Desiderata-styled prescription for a good life (“Rejoice with those who now rejoice/And weep with those who speak with broken voice/So far as you may be at peace with all/Stand alongside those of no report…Never avenge offence for offence/Pay back your enemies with love, my friends/May your prayers resound in all that you do/Welcome saint and welcome strangers too/May your prayers be wound of many a threat/And evil overcome with good”).

 Just over 80 seconds with again just minimal acoustic guitar backing, Meet Me Where I Sing And Stamp My Feet heads to the end with its call for shared communion, troubles and jubilation (“Meet me in the temple of my heart…Meet me in the sorrows of the night/Meet me in the troubles of my days/Walk with me through the times of wilderness and pain/Meet me where my prayers arise again… Let us be in love and cry and sing and laugh until the dawn/Meet me in the tavern of my dreams”).

The lyrics  again pretty much comprising of just the staccato title, it ends with the pulsing percussive drone and reverberating deep plangent piano notes of the almost ethereal Covers. Believes. Holds. Stays., a final hillside chapel-like hymnal blessing of an all-encompassing peace and assurance.  It might not reach the wide audience it deserves, but this is one of the finest old school Americana folk albums of the year. 

Thursday 2 November 2023

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN NOVEMBER 2023

 



I don’t know what
COLIN HALL takes before he goes to bed, but his latest single, The Moon & Mr Jones, was the result of dreaming about meeting David Bowie on the moon. Appropriately then, with its swayalong rhythms and cosmic keyboard frills, it has   definite spacey Bowie
flavours, not to mention being another example of the wide range of his musical inclinations. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=32X036QCeGI)


The first of what will form an eventual EP, THE LOST NOTES release their first track featuring new bassist Steve Vantsis (whose CV includes Fish, Candy Dulfer and KT Tunstall), indicating a new country sound with Don’t Try It On Me, a dusty, slow bruised heart swayer (“You can play the angel in my bed, try to put the devil in my head”) with Ben on lead and Lucy and Olly on close harmonies that could have been born in Austin and instantly claims a spot as, not just a diamond in their already vast treasure trove, but one of the best things you’ll hear this year. 


Due for release next February, now signed to Cooking Vinyl, The Pendulum Swing is the much anticipated second album from KATHERINE PRIDDY, the follow-up to the critically acclaimed and hugely successful The Eternal Rocks Beneath. It’s trailed by First House On The Left, from whence the album title comes, intimately, whisperingly sung with Nick Drake-like pastoral guitar and string caresses, inspired by the terraced cottage where she grew up and all the memories it holds of all who ever lived there. Speaking of the track, she says “I wanted this song and the album to feel lived in, and this is captured in part by the ghostly atmospheres, mechanical clockwork sounds, creaking floorboards, indistinct whispers and old tape recordings of my family that are littered throughout. I want to invite the listener to come in, sit down and inhabit the album for a little while, and this song is right at the heart of that”. Ineffably, dreamily  gorgeous  it suggests that difficult second album is going to be a walk in the park.

"Overall, I wanted this song and the album to feel lived in, and this is captured in part by the ghostly atmospheres, mechanical clockwork sounds, creaking floorboards, indistinct whispers and old tape recordings of my family that are littered throughout. I want to invite the listener to come in, sit down and inhabit the album for a little while, and this song is right at the heart of that.”

 

Monday 9 October 2023

MIKE DAVIES CO:UMN OCTOBER 2023



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. 


Sunday 3 September 2023

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN SEPTEMBER 2023

 



Dream pop outfit JAWS return in strong form with new self-released EP, If It Wasn’t For My Friends, Things Could Be Different, the title and the shimmery single Are My Friends Alright a response to frontman Connor Schofield coming out of  a long-term relationship and being supported by his mates, in turn realising he needed to be there for them more than he had been too. The more uptempo, percussive but equally hazy Sweat is about slowing own and dealing with your anxiety in the moment, while the remaining cuts comprise the drivingly propulsive  Get Up, the nasally sung Maybe I’ll Do The Same with its steady drum beat and swirly guitars and riffs and the closing clattering, hammering drums, tempo shifting  Top Of My Skull which sounds purse built to get the crowds moshing down the front.


Though embracing an array of different musical genres,
JOHN NAPIER  is generally associated with folksy acoustic. However, while that may be the bedrock on his Bandcamp download More White Elephants mini-album there’s a more electric and at times 80s rock presence at work. Mixed and mastered by fellow Birmingham musician David Benjamin Blower, available as a Bandcamp download, it opens with the pulsing  percussive bass,  sparse tinkling of Becky Pickin’s electric piano and Andy Miles’s guitar of the rather wonderful slow walking White Elephants, an ineffably sad  number about a father’s sadness that his children, his white elephants,  are unwilling or unable to leave the nest  and have lives of their own, achingly captured in the lines “Well I'm proud of my sons/But it hurts to have lived with them alone for so long/I wish they'd move on… I'm out of ideas/And I've tried to look out for them for so many years/As time lingers on/Despite my best efforts, they're no further on… They're bold and devoted, gentle and kind/Made of only the best parts of me/But each day they're wasting away on the vine”.
By contrast, featuring Vincent Gould, the other half of his electronic alt-folk duo Waler,  on slide, That's How It Goes is a short, scratchy blues lament by an ageing musician (“My guitar is cool but no one wants to play with me anymore”) while, guitar solo from Miles, Nobody Wants You has him channelling his inner Morrissey on another song   again touching on an artist’s frustrations at lack of recognition or support (“After all that you've done/Still nobody wants you, you've followed their plans/Still nobody wants you…They don't say "just give up/Cause nobody wants you"/Yet they won't lift you up”), closing with the damning “You've got the rest of your life/Why don't you do something else?” 
That undercurrent theme of rejection ,isolation and feelings of failure that can overwhelm a musician continues into Who You Are  (“Here we are, not where you thought you'd/Be at this stage of your life you thought you knew/Where you were going to end up/By the time you reached the age of 42… This is not what you had planned/When you played in our first band”)  a propulsive bluesy riffing track with driving drums and fingersnapping percussives that echoes the previous number in the line “All that promise you showed where had it all gone?/Was it worth all that sacrifice?/Would you be happier if you chose another life?” But, at the same time, it has that sense of being unable to douse the fire within, even if the flames never catch (“Can a person be content/With a talent left unspent?/ It's who you are/There's nothing you can do”).
Conjuring the softer side of Morrissey’s balladry, his voice quietly gathering intensity, it returns to parental ambivalence on the ruminative fingerpicked My Children (“Lately I've been criticised for lacking pragmatism/Maybe now is a good time to give up on my children/They've been nothing but a vice, an unhealthy compulsion/Taking over my whole life like a bad religion/So I should cut my ties/Resign myself to nihilism, without them”) as well as that feeling of growing older and that your children became the sole obsessive reason for your life (“Maybe when I was in my prime, I could be forgiven/For wasting so much of my time on this naive mission/But I can't justify/More hours set aside to study a hobby/I ought to knuckle down/And pull my finger out and focus on progress”).
Olly Forrester on drums and Gould on harps and strings on the circling fingerpicked No Church returns to images of isolation and disillusion (“No church for me, no family/I'd rather be alone/Community is not for me/All those I've seen have shown/God has died or else he lied”) with self-reliance the only refuge because “the heart is where the home is”.

After all this, it ends on the  rather more upbeat and optimistic note of the folksy picked flickering campfire singalong I Don't Know How I Know This (“Things may get much worse but someday I can tell/The world is going to wake up to itself/And be at last in perfect health… When all of those who've tried to drive us back/Will suddenly run out of track”) as he sings “I believe in paradise, here on earth not after life/And isn't that worth sacrifice/To see the best of us revived?”. He’s been  hovering on the fringes for a while; given the exposure, this may be the time to see him register on more than just the local radar. (www.johnnapier.bandcamp.com/album/more-white-elephants-mini-album)


MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2024

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