Folk Us JEANETTE LEECH says goodbye to Mike Evans of Mighty Baby, raising A Jug Of Love to the new folk releases.


There’s always seemed to me a curious but passionate love affair between avant-garde experimentation and austere traditional folksong. Thus it comes as little surprise that United Bible Studies – the Irish free-folk collective whom I


constantly bang on about as redefining brilliant – have a deeply trad arm called THE MAGICKAL FOLK OF THE FARAWAY TREE. Their name may sound like a parody but the double CD, The Soup And The Shilling (Deserted Village/deadslackstring) is anything but. The first disc is a re-release of their long-gone CD-Rs from the mid-00s while the second is all new material. It is phenomenal stuff. Just to pick a few of the many highlights: ‘Trelawny’, which moves seamlessly from a plaintive beginning to a screaming end; ‘Here’s A Health To All True Lovers’, with biting sadness in every regretful word; and ‘Blackbirds And Thrushes’, just simply beautiful rustic folk music, sung flawlessly by the incredible Dave Colohan. I’m seriously breathless with how radiant this CD is.


THE OWL SERVICE, of all the British new wave of psych-folk, seemed the most schooled and studied. Steven Collins knows his history, re-interprets it with care and assembles around him a cast of sensitive singers and musicians who do exactly the same. With


the highly anticipated new album The Pattern Beneath The Plough Part 2: The View FromAHill (Rif Mountain), part of a conceptual suite, The Owl Service has – interestingly – largely retreated from the ’60s influenced swirl prevalent on their 2007 debut album. Instead, there’s a new timelessness to their sound, using the voices of (among others) Nancy Wallace, Adam Leonard and Alison O’Donnell to masterful effect. It’s more confident than their debut and less tethered to the group’s heroes. It should please those who liked their first album and persuade others to come under their wingspan too.


The Static Caravan label has a glut of niceness out at the moment. My favourite is the welcome return of SERAFINA STEER, the harp-playing electro-folk goddess. Her first album Cheap Demo Bad Science was one of ’07’s best; it’s taken her a


while but she’s now back with Change Is Good Change Is Good (Static Caravan). Few but our Sefa can create music so laced with humour and unaffected foible while maintaining a beating, delicate folk heart. This album is more synthesiser- based than the last, and belies her debt to joyous pop music. This initially seems like a very accessible album but it’s actually quite challenging in its unexpected mix of high- church musicianship and popular culture shoplifting. Very modern sounding and very, very good.


MEN-AN-TOL’s Through The Quoit (Static Caravan) is Memory Band-esque eclecticism incarnate. At the beginning it seems destined for the indie-folk route, but then second track ‘The Well’ hits, a pentangle of Pentangle,


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The Shadow Is That Hidden by YAWNING CHASM is another lovely 3-inch CD from Ireland’s Rusted Rail label. A solo project for Aaron M Coyne, this is a six-track EP of mesmerising dream-folk, the songs softly


bouncing overhead like a handmade child’s mobile. My highlight is ‘Monsters’, an arc of luminescent strums and Coyne’s voice – often only a murmur - is similarly lullaby- esque.


Owl Service


before moving into ‘Black Waterside’, which aims at a Trees’ On The Shore sound. Best of all is ‘Paradise’, a deformed, spinning flamenco, with menacing background chanting.


The Static Caravan festival of plenty concludes with two 7” singles. First up is TULA with ‘No Name’. She offers up a gentle, bittersweet sound, very accessible but still with something untamed about it. Sounds like Emmy The Great would do if she’d just come back from a really miserable holiday. And then we have HANNAH PEEL’s ‘Rebox’. It’s four cover versions of ’80s indie and pop classics played on a musical box. It’s an interesting experiment rather than an essential listen – think Nouvelle Vague’s loungecore interpretations of


punk, and add in a splash of Beth Jeans Houghton’s irreverence. However, OMD’s ‘Electricity’ does work especially well performed this way, Peel giving the song a touching new dimension.


Two new albums have been released in quick succession (as downloads only) by MOONGAZING HARE. This is the project of Denmark’s David Folkmann Drost, and both of these really are tremendously good. The first, No True Body, is as subtle as a feather being drawn across the spine; an album of gossamer psych-folk with a touch of ambient minimalism. I can’t stop listening to ‘Rosehip Wine’, its sorrow every bit as intoxicating as the title promises. The other, Marehalm, is doomier, with


more dissonance and experimentation, its overall unsettling feel seeping equally over into My Bloody Valentine and Tower Recordings territory.


Ring Around The Land, the debut album by Birmingham duo RED SHOES, is a conventional if very enjoyable old-school acoustic, rootsy album. The title track in particular evokes a lock- in in a Midlands folk club.


Their reference points are Sandy Denny-era Fairports (in fact the album was produced by Dave Pegg) and the contemporary American country-folk of Lucinda Williams, sewn together neatly in these well-crafted songs.


If there’s one phrase likely to strike fear into my heart, it’s “heavy post- rock”. HILLS HAVE RIFFS is the heavy post- rocker concerned, an alias for DCW Briggs, the frontman of Cove. I put The Countryside Has Escaped (Noisestar) on


expecting very little. Instead, I got very much. It’s lo-fi, compulsive, circular and rhythmic. There’s some particularly stunning cello, coming courtesy of drone-merchant Alexander Tucker (who also produces). I wish Briggs wouldn’t sing though; his vocals are a bit too self- consciously dark and these tracks would work much better as instrumentals.


It was unbelievable news when, in December, JACK ROSE passed away. One of the true originals to emerge in the last decade, he not only updated the American Primitive genre but took it to new heights of dexterity and artistry.


The posthumous release, Luck In The Valley (Thrill Jockey), is a good place to start for anyone unfamiliar with his work. Its intense ragged beauty, Rose’s hallmark, reverberates in every picked note. Just listen to the sonorous expedition of ‘Blues For Percy Danforth’ or the tender ‘Woodpiles On The Side Of The Road’, and then have a cry, knowing the man who created this glory died far, far too young.


www.deadslackstring.com www.rifmountain.com www.staticcaravan.org


moongazinghare.bandcamp.com www.4zerorecords.com www.rustedrail.com www.noisestar.co.uk www.thrilljockey.com


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