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. 

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.”

 

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 19^th 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. 

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 AUGUST 2023

Having ostensibly retired following 2016’s Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul, following a  spell in Thailand reassesssing himself and his beliefs, especially in regard to women, Kevin Rowland returns with DEXY’S  and The Feminine Divine (100% Records) as, joined by long-time collaborator Big Jim Paterson on trombone, Sean Read on sax and Toby Chapman on pretty much everything else other than Mike Timothy playing keys on a couple of tracks, they deliver an album that is both familiar and startlingly different.

It opens with The One That Loves You,  written  with Paterson in 1991 during Rowlands’ cocaine addiction, the words and melody tumbling out in an infectious evocation of 70s soul with a Dexy’s twist and a decided alpha male posturing (“I’m not denying baby, you’re a very strong woman/but you’ll need my love darling cos they’ll be times when you’re just not so sure/A man comes up to you, he says how do you do/But you can tell from the look in his eye that he’s not just the friendly kind, you show that man to me, cos he’s offended me, and I would like to demonstrate to him, black Irish chivalry”. 

That stance is, however, immediately offset by It’s Alright Kevin (Manhood 2023), another Paterson co-write and a revision of the track from the 2003 compilation Let’s Make This Precious which  opens with a spoken intro as, addressing notions of masculinity, he declares “this is what I really think” before singing “I tried so hard to live a lie pretending I was some tough guy/But now I’ve had enough. /I can’t live that way no more”,  a dose of excoriating self-therapy with the backing singers providing the call and response question with lines like “Did that compound your sense of doubt?”

Following the same structure, I’m Going to Get Free with its pounding drums,  blaring horns and Woah-ho backing vocals continues the liberation from old ways, declaring “I had so much hate in me/I stopped and I looked and I said to myself/I’m not liking what I see/Now I’m going to get free”. That’s fittingly followed, in turn, with the keys backed Irish soul disco pop, crowd singalong chorus  of the ridiculously uplifting   ‘Coming Home’, the third Paterson co-write where, the backing singers providing the commentary,  he asserts that having  “Been tortured by what I tried to be” now “I’m coming home, I want to be myself again”.

Things takes a musical swerve in the second half as the slurring funky title track with its Northern Soul undercurrents  and Maddy Read Clarke providing the counterpointing vocals, introduces the synthy electronics and shifts from masculine to feminine, announcing  that” Women have been put down for too long and it’s up to you and me”, which some might feel is rather stating the bloody obvious with Kev coming on as some white saviour of womanhood as,  repenting his past sexist bullshit behaviour (“Men didn’t know what the fuck to do/so we controlled, we bullied, and we blamed it all on you… today and I know I was the worst …I took out my frustrations on them and them devalued all their worth”), he  announces “Women are the superstars, the goddesses on earth / They need to be cherished, worshipped and adored / It’s not for them to do things for us / We’ve got it the wrong way round / We should be serving them for all we’re worth”. The theme and the funk continue with the squelchy My Goddess Is, the spoken lyrics surely channelling Dylan, as we enter the submission phase with the decidedly S&M lines “My Goddess is, glorious and mean, every time she treats me bad, I get even more keen… My Goddess, she tells me I’m her bitch, makes me serve her every need, and scratch her every itch”. It’s on then to  the sleazy, sultry Prince-flavoured electro hip hop groove Goddess Rules,  the spoken word exchanges between him and  co-writer Kamaria Castang a sort of role reversal of those old Barry White numbers.

Photo credit Sandra Vijandi

The theme of submission is overtly addressed in the gorgeous six-minute, piano ballad My Submission with its Debussy colourings and Irish soul as, voice soaring to Orbison heavens and one of the best things he’s recorded, he avows   “I will dedicate my life to serving you”, though again that S&M streak surfaces in the spoken passage  as he says “I will be your pet, to do with as you will”.

It ends with the pulsing late night electronic funk, warm and smoothly sung  Dance With Me, a number, which has him adoringly dressing up his woman and asking for one dance  so she can go out into the night and express her sexuality (“I’m thinking about you now as somebody holds you tight/Can’t wait to see you again and hear about your night/I hope you’ll take that love, cos it’s your god-given right”) which may be all rather kinky in its implied vicarious thrills but, like its predecessor, also gives the lie to those who’ve ever sneered at his vocals.  

Waving a flag for the sensitive woke new man movement may well encourage derision in some quarters, but anyone with an ear will realise this is Rowlands at the peak of his musical powers. 

Funded by The National Lottery Community Fund and working with Good Neighbours, a Coventry-based charity that supports lonely and isolated older people by linking them with volunteer befrienders, Back in the Day (Tortoise Recordings) is a new EP from Steve Jones aka STYLUSBOY, a collection of songs inspired by six of the older people he met with and the stories of  their lives. Featuring harmonies from Mississippi-born Americana songstress Alva Leigh, it opens with the steady chug of ‘Fourteen Days’ which tells of how John, a 102-year-old WWII pilot who was shot down over enemy lines and spent the next fortnight living off the land as he made his escape back to England. The line about The Caterpillar Club is a reference to an informal association of those who have successfully   parachuted out of a disabled aircraft. 

The war is also the backdrop to the acoustic guitar ringing, chorus friendly ‘Lift Your Voice’, sung in the voice of a woman who worked riveting planes and who, every lunchtime, would, just as she did for her auntie as a child and later for soldiers on leave, exhorted with “come on Joan”, sing to raise everyone’s spirits. Featuring Lauren South on violin, the swaying ‘In The Morning Light’ is about Blossom, who, grafting in the factory, “Pulls out her fight as/The nine to five begins/She works all the hours/Puts bread on the table/Determined to make it/To see through the darkness/And do it all by herself”.  Referencing the Coventry Blitz, the melodically circling ‘Waiting To Say Hello’ is a lovely tale of  old friends and good neighbours sharing memories (“She takes down the dusty box/Treasures just waiting to be found/The sadness of voices past/Joys of the loves she holds so dear”) and a cup of tea as “We talk and we put the world to rights”. Reminiscent of The Lilac Time,  Doreen is the inspiration for the slow balladeering ‘Days Are Made For Living’ with its chiming electric guitar chords, violin and  its message to “Take each step as it comes/Look each day in the eye/There’s always beauty in the moments you’ll find”, while the final track, the fingerpicked and puttering percussive beats five-minute ‘Take A Little More Time’ with its Nick Drake hints and harmonies from  Sam Lyon, Isabel Costa, Wes Finch and Evie Jones, taps the memories of Freda whose kind-heartedness saw her invited to tea with Queen Elizabeth II. (www.stylusboy.co.uk)  

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JULY 2023

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=SHPl5u9bOTU  celebrating the joy of movement.

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)

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JUNE 2023

A swift follow-up to last year’s  Vanaprastha,  ARMCHAIR GODS duo Paul Kearns and Steve Peckover return with Doubt The Stars, another outstanding collection of chilled and meditative progressive rock instrumentals, here with a cosmic backdrop both musically and thematically in what they describe as a sonic celestial odyssey.

Indeed, it opens with Odyssey reflecting the journey into space after leaving earth, awed by the majesty of the stars and feeling insignificant in the scheme of things, flowing into the darker sounding  and turbulence threatening Argo Navis, named for a constellation of stars, with its pulsing keyboard tempests and heavy drum beats transposing the myth of Jason and the Argonauts into space conjuring with the initial siren’s call and then the sea god Triton holding back the clashing rocks to provide safe passage.

Passing through the storm, things become calm with the ebb and flow of Ataraxia, named for the term meaning calmness untroubled by mental or emotional disquiet, the drums kicking back in for Requiem, a number fuelled by anger at the contradiction of how humanity can create something like the James Webb telescope and yet still be mired waging medieval barbaric wars, the piece composed of two states representing a star moving violently though its life cycle before burning out, the monastic chant element taking its influence from Mozart's Requiem while the soaring guitar solo midway was improvised in a  single take. 

Echoing the time portal motif at the start of Ataraxia but revisited with different instrumentation, Portal II is a 30 second transition into the serene synth-strings opening title track, which,  with drums and losing guitar solo and  , is a collaboration with Derbyshire-based singer/songwriter Carol Fieldhouse who also provides the pure crystalline hymnal vocals (reminding me of Maggie Reilly on Mike Oldfield’s Moonlight Shadow)the words inspired by Shakespeare’s poem “Doubt thou the stars are fire” and the beliefs of his  day and exploring the relationship between ourselves and the perception of enduring truth in the aim of bringing light and hope to the shade. 

It ends with the steady marching beat and keyboard swirls of Red Shift Dawn, a musically stirring, guitar cloud surfing celebration of the  James Webb Telescope mission, looking back in time at red shifted starlight from the very first stars created just after the big bang. Resisting the prog-rock tendency for long, self-indulgent pieces, only one track runs anything approaching five minutes, creating a seamless flow that creates its intended impression before moving on. Like the space mission it conjures, this feels like just the start of a voyage into the vastness of the galactic horizons, long may they boldly go. 

MARK LEMON doffs the cap to the Carry On films on his infectious singalong new single All The Carry On Stars (which, he in leather jacket, comes with a great video with 60s clips, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ch7IT0TyRU) celebrating its saucy double entendres.

ELIZABETH J BIRCH is what might be called alt-folktronica, using synths and loops to create the textures and melodies that enfold her words. Her latest self-released excursion is Kenopsia, which means the eerie atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but now abandoned, a definition that well captures the atmosphere she weaves as her voice swoops and soars across and between the music. Available from Bandcamp (https://elizabethjbirch.bandcamp.com), it’s an eight track set that opens with the title number, moving through the cosmic drift of  Barely to the stabbing pulses of Night Turned Morning by way of the turbulent Wallpaper m the underwater ambience of Come Home and the heavy electric storm of the instrumental closer Stages One, Two and Three. You might detect traces of Kate Bush and the enigmatic quality of the lyrics, but Birch is very much a singular voice.