Clayhill - Clayhill

Track List:

1. Figure Of Eight
2. Northern Soul
3. Mystery Train
4. Face Of The Sun
5. Grasscutter
6. Funny How
7. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
8. Disscordents

Running time: 36 minutes
Released: 2005

And so I come to a draft that has been sat around for a couple of years.

This post almost appeared titled incorrectly as "Acoustic", for that is how it lived in my library for too long. In sourcing the track list and image I realised my error and re-titled it appropriately so that it can appear in the right place at the right time. It is an acoustic album and "Acoustic" is often added to the name in references, it would seem. Oh well, correction made.

Clayhill are made up of bassist Ali Friend (of Red Snapper and The Imagined Village), vocalist Gavin Clark (Sunhouse, UNKLE) and Ted Barnes (who did work with Beth Orton, as well as solo). Friend's name may have been enough to get me to look them up, but I think I cottoned on to them via Red Snapper's Redone - an album of remixes and a notable cover of Odd Man Out. It isn't credited as Clayhill, but it is Friend, and Clark for sure; not sure about Barnes. The latter's voice was stunning and I was hooked.

This is the first midweek listen I have managed in I don't know how long, and I am able to fit it in only because I bailed on a roleplaying session after three really bad nights of sleep. I am far too busy to find time for everything I have to do and everything I want to do, and getting the rest and recuperation I need to function. Oh well; the late Gavin Clark delivers a soft, almost apologetic song over a simple guitar hook supported by Friend's upright bass. Figure of Eight is a tune based on simplicity for the most part. The trio play off each other well. The bass is subtle and fills in the gaps behind the guitar, which is plucky and bright as it slides under the nasal, drawn out tones of our vocalist. 

As much as I like Figure of Eight, there are two tracks on this album I really adore. The first is Northern Soul - though I am more familiar with the original recording on Small Circle, it is impressive how well the sound transfers to the striped back version here. This song has a punchier hook, a twangier bass, a firmer vocal and a chorus that strikes a chord even though I am a softy southerner not a hardy northern type. The little fussy, busy bits of guitar work are a joy and I imagine they had great fun recording this track - it has that kind of positive energetic style coming through the speaker. The other song that matches this is their cover of The Smiths' Please Please Please... (The Smiths, for disclosure, are not a band I have in my library - though like every human being alive I have a soft spot for the guitar on This Charming Man).

Ali Friend is a musical chameleon - a running thread through disparate groups in my collection, popping up backing people unexpectedly. I love his bass work. Videos of live sets and tracks from Red Snapper burned that love into me a long time ago and it has never left. The sorrowful twang that he gets onto some of his notes here is gorgeous and dovetails nicely with the hurt that Clark injects into his long vowels.

This is exactly the type of low-key music I need on a night like this. I go on holiday in a week, but I have a ton of stuff to wrap up before then... and my ability to do so may well depend on how well I can relax and find sleep this evening. Anything that helps me drift into a loose state is good, and there is a nice laziness to Clayhill's music that helps the mood. It's not chill out fare really, but the tones are low and soothing. The vocal is often challenging and emotional but it is the frequency of the instruments that I find cathartic - mostly the bass, but the guitar doesn't wander off too much either.

I am not that keen on Grasscutter, possibly because it features on three of the 4 Clayhill albums I have and as such it comes up more often than it should. It also devolves into repetition too much for my liking. I think I might trim this version. We then hit the final trio - songs which do not appear on the other Clayhill discs. Funny How doesn't ring any bells for me until Clark hits the chorus and then it finds familiarity. I really like the interplay here, but above all it is the tone - pleading yet wronged, defiant yet downcast. I find little contrasts like that throughout the song, which is a nice touch in my book, and makes up for the fact it sits between me and the heartbreak of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.

Slow, deliberate, nail through the hand hurt. Every note and word here is pitched for maximum emotional impact. As someone who has gone through periods of depression in the past where it felt nothing was going my way the song resonates. As alluded to above I am not really familiar with the original, but this is frankly so good that I don't feel the need to be. Here - I am feeling like sharing the love:

The final track is always going to be a bit of a come-down after that. It is a slow, slow number. Very sparse, drawn out words. I like it, but I miss most of it as I got distracted by a work email, just as the US working day is closing. Oh well (I seem to say that a lot).

Child Ballads - Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer

Track list:

1. Willie o Winsbury (Child 100)
2. Willie's Lady (Child 6)
3. Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58)
4. Riddles Wisely Expounded (Child 1)
5. Clyde's Water (Child 216)
6. Geordie (Child 209)
7. Tam Lin (Child 39)

Running time: 39 minutes
Released: 2013

Americans take on British folk ballads. I would never have picked this up had I not heard and loved some of Anaïs Mitchell's music elsewhere. I have at least three of these tunes by other artists in very different forms - including a version of Willie o Winsbury that I really love by the late Charlotte Greig, whose At Llangennith (on which said version is found) is still one of my favourite albums.

Here it opens with Mitchell's somewhat strangled voice offset by Hamer's pitching higher. Its a strange role reversal, but it works. The tune here is simply and stripped back to give the duet the spotlight. Already I have had to correct too many typos in this post, I think my ability to type is dying. My hands are actually aching a bit in worrying fashion, despite my not having to work today and thus I haven't subjected them to a barrage of typing already. I discovered Anaïs Mitchell through this project, as she was included on a BBC Folk Awards album. I have picked up a fair bit since. Her voice is different, but pleasantly so. This version of the tune is so different from Greig's that without knowing it was the same song supporting both I would never have picked up on it. This is simple and acoustic, with nothing of the enveloping warmth on a dark winter night of Greig's take. Here it is nice but not woven into my psyche in the same way.

I find myself less enamoured of Willie's Lady. The tune that they pick out is rather... flat. The volume on the guitar is a more significant factor in the shaping of this song, and the line is just not engaging at all. Add to that a bit of forced jauntiness in rhythm and song and I find the effort tiresome. I wonder if I am bouncing off because of my mood, my expectations or some other reason, and I hope that it is just this track that annoys me.

I have 4 versions of Sir Patrick Spens, putting Mitchell and Hamer in the company of Yorkston, Boden and Fairport Convention. I was only consciously aware of the Yorkston version, and could not call the tune to mind. Happily I find I like this. The simple inclusion of a fiddle to offset the guitar lending a nice feel to the composition, and the dueting voices fit better here than on Willie's Lady - there is no forced happiness, no injected bounce, no annoying carry to the rhythm. There are swells and lulls, there is a top end from the violin. It is, I think, this last item that really helps shape the tune. You can't have British folk with no fiddle!*

We now head into a run of three tunes that I do not recognise by name. I dislike the conceit of construction in Riddles Wisely Expounded, where every other line cycles a 2-line call and answer, and the actual lyrics are on the odd lines. Its just dull and unnecessarily repetitive. I imagine this is reproduced faithfully so it can't be held against our performers, other than through their choice of ballads to include. That said, it is Child 1; the first amongst many. I am falling, again, into the blow-by-blow, failing to avoid short snippets about each track. So to digress deliberately, whilst Mitchell carries a verse without her partner, making a nice change, I have a long weekend, 4 days. I also have only 1 full week in 6, thanks to strategic holiday (carried from 2016) and Easter. I hope that this concentration of 4-day weeks will help me rediscover my energy after a long while of feeling enervated. I plan to get back on the bike I bought last September to get some exercise. I plan to enjoy the warmer weather if it arrives, the longer days. Maybe the sun will show up. We had a nice day on Wednesday, I think. I was working from home, and made several trips down the garden - taken out recycling - to feel sun on skin.

Back on the record we're hitting Geordie. As it starts I immediately remember the tune. I am not over-keen on the bright roll injected into the lines here, they trill up and down and it seems to go against the dark tale told by the song. There are some very nice points to the song - I like that Hamer carries most of it for instance, reversing the normal balance of the two voices - but it ends rather abruptly. Much shorter than the other numbers here, it feels incomplete as a result, pitching us into Tam Lin.

This I really like. Here the natural rhythm to word and playing feels like it fits, it lends a sense of personality, of point, to the opening verse. Mitchell's voice over the lightly-touched guitar is a wonderful combination. The way these two attack this classic is entirely in keeping with what little I know of the song, which mostly comes from the modernised tale narrated by Benjamin Zephaniah for The Imagined Village. They have the right sense of urgency, the right tone. It's a really strong closing track - easily my favourite from the seven presented. If you look up one ballad from this set, make it Tam Lin.
 
*Of course you can.

Bending the Dark - The Imagined Village

Track list:

1. The Captain’s Apprentice
2. New York Trader
3. Wintersinging
4. The Guvna
5. Sick Old Man
6. Nest
7. Fisherman
8. Get Kalsi
9. Washing Song
10. Bending the Dark

Running time: 55 minutes
Released: 2012

The Imagined Village. I liked their first album a lot but then soured on them a bit. I have, however, stumbled across a very positive BBC Music review of this album in the process of preparing for this post so perhaps it is a good thing to be revisiting this again. To not influence any reading of this piece, I leave the link to the end.

I have been a bit quiet here of late - nothing for over a week. I may be back from my holidays but I have been tied up one way or another - busy evenings, a weekend with the niece and nephew, tiredness and, significantly, the cricket commentaries coming from the West Indies where England are playing. These have filled up the evenings when I have been around, and I can't listen to two things at once. I have other things on the go that I haven't got to in my evenings, too - for example i am now 2 sessions behind writing up my Albion game. I was going to address that yesterday until I got caught in an accident tailback (two, actually) and it took almost 3 hours to get home from work, normally 40 minutes away, and so I was not in a mood conducive to writing.

Enough grumbling, I have just about managed to find a window for this within 2 weeks of the last post so lets dive in. The opening is an unaccompanied female voice, Jacqui Oates, that I recognise as one of The Winterset backing Rachel Unthank on The Bairns; we then get percussion and eventually a top end joining in. When the vocal returns it is, instead, Eliza Carthy. This is one of the things that attracted me to The Imagined Village - the range of musicians involved. This line up is different from that on their debut; there is overlap but some have gone, some have arrived.

Of course Carthy's vocal is also a different track to Oates' and so, I presume, was the top end. I just missed the transition... rustiness showing immediately. It makes more sense this way, mind. New York Trader is quite a rich number, blending a lot of different influences - another plus from The Imagined Village concept and range of contributers - compared to the sparseness of the short opener.

Two and a bit tracks in now, and I am again reminded about how thin the lines between genre can be, and in places you may not expect. Here on Wintersinging the percussion is persistent and incessant in a manner not unlike something you might hear in a club, weighted by the bass of Ali Friend of Clayhill and more pertinently Red Snapper, who I have seen (on video alas) doing Drum 'n' Bass live with an upright bass. The difference is in the composition of the top end - what instruments are involved - and, crucially I think, the relative volumes of the parts. I really like this track, both as an example of the fragility of genre as a concept and more simply as a piece of music. I am already much better disposed to this album than I was expecting to be before reading up on it.

The Guvna is a disappointment as a follow up - I think it misses something from not having any vocal. I recall this track being called out in the BBC piece but I read that nearer 3 weeks ago and cannot recall why. I still worry that it is influencing my opinion, but the track is simply lacking engagement. It's not unpleasant or anything, just... bland? Thankfully a singer is reintroduced for the next track, which includes Raggle Taggle Gypsy, which I am more familiar with from The Waterboys. This track again features Friend's distinctive twangy bass, with which I am very familiar, the notes he leaves phrases on, the structures of his hooks here, could come straight from a Red Snapper record, which is a fine thing as far as I am concerned.

Tonal shift. A softer song, less bassy, percussion relegated to supporting role rather than dominant structure, and back to Oates as vocalist, albeit sharing some duties with Carthy and a male voice - which one of the candidates I can't pin down by ear. Nest is alright, but I am immediately drawn in to the dark tone of the following track, a sleazy but enticing schmooze with a rich arrangement that pairs really well with Carthy's signing. This feels less folk, more noir despite being titled Fisherman. I love it.

Its not as if I have been completely music free in the weeks intervening between this and posting Beat the Champ - but it feels good to give time to some music again, even as I simultaneously distract myself by typing and glancing every now and again at the silent snooker on the TV. I have not managed to immerse myself in listening to anything else in the interim. Even in yesterdays snore-fest of a drive home there was no music, TMS kept me entertained instead as the cricket is back on, and forms one reason why I am forcing myself to do this listen mid-morning, else it could be another half week before I get to anything.

I have found the more percussive numbers, the grungier less folky numbers more interesting on this disc but I do appreciate the wandering styles, and Washing Song being predominantly stripped back to Carthy, a keyboard and fiddle is a strong counter to some of the earlier sounds. As I head into the last track I can honestly say I have really enjoyed this listen, but I am concerned it might all be destroyed by stupid silence given the 12 minute length of the title track. Hopefully its actually all music all the way - seems quite likely with the way the piece has started - a sort of rolling amalgam of the various styles of the individual contributors, rather than a coherently directed effort. As I type that it drops into sparse wandering, which would be dull except it brings to mind summer days. When it starts to build again I find it less interesting, a return to the busy but flat sound that The Guvna brought.

I hear in there a melody that I recognised, but could not place. Checking liner notes, it references The Cuckoo's Nest which immediately makes sense. That phase passes and we enter some serious drumming. To be honest I find this a shambles. The best songs on this album were tightly crafted works, using the different influences and contributors but pulling in one direction. This closer is undirected which means that whilst different aspects of it are quite decent the overall impression is not strong.

So, a disappointing close, but overall a very worthwhile album with a few tracks I enjoyed immensely. That title track goes. The other disappointing ones... I think I need another time through, or perhaps to listen to them isolated from the pieces that were so much better.

The BBC review I mentioned is here, by the way.

Bellow - Spiers & Boden

Track list:

1. Prickle Eye Bush
2. Sloe Gin Set: Frozen Gin/Vinegar Reel/The Sloe
3. Courting Too Slow
4. Dawn Chrous
5. The Outlandish Knight
6. Jiggery Pokerwork/Haul Away/Seven Stars
7. Go And Leave Me
8. Jack Robinson/Argiers/Old Tom Of Oxford
9. Copshawholme Fair
10. Princess Royal/Cuckoo's Nest
11. Brown Adam
12. Ginger Up Lustily/Old Woman Tossed Up In A Blanket

Running time: 58 minutes
Released: 2003

Ah, a true favourite now, indulging my folky side. Spiers & Boden (leading lights of Bellowhead) are my go-to guys for folk songs and tunes. Don't they look young on the cover!

It is a great shame that they no longer perform as a duo because I always found their gigs much better as a pair than when they had all the brass and all to back them too. I shouldn't complain too much, Bellowhead are dear to me too, but still... these two, when they were on song, were fantastic live and great on record. Assuming you like that sort of thing. Many a well known Bellowhead track appears on this album (which features Benji Kirkpatrick in places too) but perhaps my favourite track here is Brown Adam, one of 5 that as far as I am aware were not redone with Bellowhead. Most of them are grand, though, so on with it!

Prickle Eye Bush is our opener, a criminal's promise to go straight if given a chance. It is a catchy tune, but a repetitive one... three times telling the same tale with a new person coming to see the condemned and - mayhap - to pay for his freedom. Naturally the first two don't but (spoilers!) the third, his true love, does. The repetition makes it a song that does not work so well on record. You can forgive the retreads much more in live performance where the mannerisms of the performers make up for the sameness of the song.

It has been too long since my last post, but things have gone a little awry and not made progressing this one before now easy. I am doing it now after a long day's gardening with sore hands and a head with no focus for anything more strenuous (like writing up yesterday's RPG session). Good job I know this one well and like it well too.

That said, the Sloe Gin Set is a bit of a bête noire of mine - I have been to so many Bellowhead gigs now that I am truly bored of it as it was ever present until last years tour of Revival where it didn't feature at the date I made. In truth it is the first tune in the set that bores me, the latter two being a bit more lively and here it works better than with the full band. That goes double for Courting Too Slow, where the wider arrangement available on Burlesque offers so little extra that the slow number is just a weight against the songs it accompanies. Here there is a great mournful tone to the combination of fiddling and squeezing that I cannot picture in my head for the Bellowhead version and it saves the song for me.

Dawn Chorus is the first track not repeated with Bellowhead - it simply wouldn't work as it is really a John Spiers solo (I wouldn't swear it, but I think I have seen him perform it as such) with a bit of support. This tune is one of the first by Spiers & Boden that I remember being fully sold on - the rise and fall of the melody, the slightly twee change up, the phasic pattern of how it returns through the theme. Its repetition done in a way that does not get old.

Ah, that staccato violin... from the first second The Outlandish Knight is thoroughly recognisable and totally arresting. I love this song for its improbability, its roots and its implementation. I love this stripped back rendition, I love the full band effort. Here, like many other pieces, I am continuously surprised and delighted at the apparent complexities that a fiddle/squeezebox duo can get into their playing, the themes they can support alongside each other, the variation in the playing. That sense only increases with the next track, a medley which is probably also my favourite Bellowhead track. The haunting nature to the tune that Spiers carries on Jiggery Pokerwork sets a tone that is then snapped in balls-to-the-wall gusto as it opens up. I maintain it is impossible to listen to Haul Away without being compelled to tap your feet and to sit still whilst hearing Seven Stars. Actually, Haul Away is such a favourite that even as I am trying to concentrate on writing this I find myself starting to mouth along with the simple shanty lyrics. To me, this set is a perfect representation of why I fell into folk music - energetic, emphatic, enthusiastic and simply about enjoyment and entertainment. If I could only take one folk track to listen to on a trip, I reckon it would be this one.

Jon Boden is if not the most charismatic person I have had course to see in the flesh then very close to it. His command of a stage is mesmeric, his love of performance highly infectious. His voice is strong, but whilst I increasingly see it as rather one-tone his sheer showmanship makes up for that and then some. It is John Spiers though who inspires me - since getting into their music I have several times thought fleetingly about the idea of getting some kind of organ and trying to learn to play. Every time one of his tunes comes up I imagine being able to produce such engaging sounds from the often ungainly-looking apparatus he uses and find myself wondering about what it would take. The expense and likely terrible realisation that I have no talent at all stay my hand (to the relief of my neighbours).

Copshawholme Fair was how I found myself getting into these guys. I don't much like this song now (I think the playing is exemplary mind), but Bellowhead's version came up on a LastFM station I was listening to based on The Imagined Village and it was a very interesting sound, which I was compelled to follow up on after reading a little about the band and their make-up. From there interest expanded and remains strong. However it is the more stripped back sounds of the duo that I find myself drawn to. At this moment I cannot think of a song done both by Spiers & Boden and by Bellowhead where I prefer the Bellowhead track. I don't know why this is, perhaps as I grow more curmudgeonly I resent having to track quite so much with my ears and mind when I have such good "simple" versions? Hah, as if.

Into the final straight now, two tune sets and the favourite amongst favourites to go. The tunes are well and good, but it is the evocative images conjured by Brown Adam that I love. The combination of the players, their voices (often in harmony here) and the song itself has a magical quality that just works for me. It's not perfect - it has more than a hint of gender inequality about it as you might expect from traditional material. I think, though (and I hope I am remembering this right) it was the liner notes that mentioned the cult of Wayland and brought folklore into the mix that sold me completely and utterly on the song. It remains a favourite.

All has gone quiet as the disc ends, finishing before I could articulate a short thought on a 6 minute track which I started to type before it started to play. Sometimes our brains just don't behave. I'm off to see if I can persuade mine to start working again.

All Is Fair - Gojogo

Track List:

1. Sounds In the Fields
2. Tezeta
3. Puppets
4. Dusk
5. All Is Fair In Love and War
6. Yangsta
7. Taal Mama
8. Aviary
9. Hush

Running time: 47 minutes
Released: 2006

Now this is an oddity. I bought this album after Gojogo came up in a LastFM station I was listening to, I think based on The Imagined Village shortly after their eponymous debut. I remember delighting in the ambience but have not listed to any tracks from this album for a long time. It should be an interesting one to return to.

It opens very... classically.  Not what I remember. I am a little tipsy as I type this and listening to Gogjogo's new-agey work as a counterpoint to a bitty and unfulfilling work day  and the bile and rubbish that I have been exposed to as I catch myself up on the hideous mess that is GamerGate. If you do not know what that is I envy you. Save yourself the trouble, do not look it up.

Tezeta is more like what I was expecting to hear, unconventional percussion with a sparse string melody. I am not sure I like the strings, but the rhythm is compelling, if a little hypnotic. It is a short piece though and before I finish a paragraph it is done. Puppets is in a similar vein, but with the emphasis more on the bass/rhythm, the string melody is somehow subservient to them, slaved to the beat (it is also less harshly recorded). Overall I really like this track.

OK to get the major criticism out of the way first: this does all sound a bit deliberately ethnic, a bit "look at us we're diverse". It would be easy to dismiss this album as an ethnic recording, but for the fact the group are white Americans. but that would be missing the point. And missing the genius. The album comes alive with All is Fair in Love and War (which, as it starts, I keep expecting to morph into Knight Rider) and its sheer immediacy. Heavily percussive there are much more western sensibilities about the track, even if the percussion still gives it an eastern sound. There is a tension, a knife edge provided by the structure, the rapid beat, one that is not at all dismissed by the plaintive guitar over the top. It vanishes, to be replaces with an uneasy calm after a few minutes... the track changing tone dramatically as a result, but feeling like there is something to be stoked... only to peter out unsastisfyingly without regaining the urgency with which it opened. I like the track as a whole, but it really could have done with ending on a bang, not a whimper.

Yangsta, which follows starts slow, but does build it is almost entirely percussive, the string line here being so high as to be miss-able. The rhythm is infectious and the introduction of different sounds to complement the basic loop constructs a highly infectious track. This is not representative of anything else in my library, it stands alone - yet music being what music is, the jump from this track to the jazzier end of drum and bass (something that will come up later) is not a massive one. Music is so interconnected, so fluid. In looking them up, it seems they had another album in 2011 - I am enjoying this enough to suggest that I should look it up; Taal Mama might be the best track yet.

Aviary is more hit and miss. It carries virtually no melody in places and the percussion is nothing like interesting enough to pull off the "main event" it is aiming for. And yet it remains an engaging listen because of its difference. The closer is more challenging, but rewarding. It introduces brass for the first time, warbling jazzy laments over the layered soundscape provided by the now familiar percussion and strings. I find my thoughts drifting nicely, the track slipping by, the album closing.

Despite the time, and perhaps because of inebriation, the album as flown by. I am not left with the same strong impression that I recall having on first exposure, but I am left thinking that it is a very nice counterpoint to most of my music. A lot of thought, and no little skill, went into producing this, and whilst it is at best an occasional enjoyment, it is an enjoyment to be savoured.