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The album is dedicated to Wizz’s fallen comrades Bert Jansch and Clive Palmer, both of whom feature, as do Ralph McTell, John Renbourn, Lazy Farmer and Pete Berryman. Nary an issue of this magazine passes without us bemoaning a world that affords so little acclaim to such a giant as Wizz Jones, so buy this album and make him famous!
www.derrolladams.org www.wizzjones.com
Stephen Hunt
BELLA HARDY With The Dawn Noe Records NOE08
With The Dawn is a title redolent of new beginnings. Not without reason. This, as the editor would have it, is a Great Leap Forward of a record.
Bella’s voice, like a razor- winged bird in a clear blue sky, speaks for itself. But her
writing here is a breath-halter – articulate, earthbound and disarmingly honest. Rather than drawing inspiration from the traditional canon, the songs document, and attempt to make sense of, a turbulent year on the road: a relentless year of displacement, of heartache and of joy. Her intimate observations and rev- elations are sharply focused and poetically crafted, from the hearth-embrace of friend- ship in The Darkening Of The Day to the mis- fit-relationship study of Gifts or the hopeful resolution of And We Begin.
And the writing on With The Dawn explodes into life as a result of the instinctive match of sound to lyrics. Its great, enveloping bigness, its aching starkness and melancholy, its mellifluous loveliness! The artful and intu- itive sound-painting of (my new favourite!) producer, Ben Seal is masterly. It sweeps you into Bella’s world, to share not just the blurred landscapes she sees from the trains, the tumbleweed existence of life on the road, but also the moments of revelation in a sun- rise, the Damascene clarity of a homecoming, the revised expectations, the making sense of lost and found love, the search for meaning.
The Only Thing To Do is a case in point, matching Bella’s litany of incessant motion, her frenetic physical and raw emotional ride of a year, with anthemic horns and edgy elec- tronic blips and neon buzzes. The wistful First Light Of The Morning (hear it on this issue’s fRoots 53 compilation) builds and drops back from a bare-boned banjo melody and a tsunami-swell of brass, exquisitely framing
Bella Hardy
Bella’s tumbling cascade of a vocal. On the dark and bruised Another Whisky Song, we hear a scratchy gramophone-filtered fiddle and drunken, lurching percussion. And there is also a glorious magpie collection of sounds here to add texture and depth and colour: the rough-edged immediacy of an iPhone- recorded intro on You Don’t Have To Change (But You Have To Choose) bursting into vivid studio crispness; plunky koto-esque sounds; high, reedy violin motifs; rushes of harmonies.
Whilst all the songs bear witness to
Bella’s year, two songs fit in a slightly differ- ent capacity: the moving Jolly Good Luck To The Girl That Loves A Soldier (from the WWI- themed Songs For The Voiceless project) and the traveller’s eyes of Time Wanders On, co- written with Cara Luft as part of a Canadian exchange project.
Just as with the Unthanks’ wonderful blurring of musical boundaries, the 6Music market surely beckons for Bella, as well as reaffirming her status as a shining star in the folk scene’s firmament. With The Dawn feels like a game-changer.
www.bellahardy.com Sarah Coxson
SAM LEE & FRIENDS The Fade In Time Nest Collective Records
And so, the intrepid Sam Lee grapples imperiously with the difficult second album. And wins.
Having enjoyed so much coverage and recognition from the Mercury Music Prize-nominated Ground Of Its Own, he’s unlikely to get
half as much attention this time round which is a shame because The Fade In Time is far superior. Warmer, bigger, grander, more imaginative, more varied, more confident, more dramatic, more accessible and generally – from archive samples to boldly left-field arrangements – it’s magnificent.
As before, the roots of the album remain firmly embedded in the travelling singers – most notably his mentor Stanley Robertson – with some well-known material like Bonny Bunch Of Roses, Lord Gregory and Blackbird included. But, in cahoots with co-producers Jamie Orchard-Lisle and Arthur Jeffes of Pen- guin Café, each track decamps somewhere else entirely. The Bonny Bunch Of Roses, in particular, is spectacular. Liberally interspersed with an archive recording of an Eastern Euro- pean cantor singer, Lee delivers the song in
Sam Lee
meditative wonder over a compelling back- drop of rumbling percussion and Gypsy violin.
Amid a volley of determined brass, Black-
bird gets a veritable Wall of Sound treat- ment; a hushed choir gives Lovely Molly a hymn-like feel; Tajikistan wedding bands inspire a sinister arrangement of Johnny O’ The Brine populated by staccato hunting horns; wailing fiddle colours the dreamy Phoenix Island; the bouncy Willie O gets what can only be described as an acid trip-hop arrangement; and there’s something almost mystical about the way the Japanese flavour colouring the lamenting On Yonders Hill segues into the voice of source singer Freda Black reciting the words.
Lord Gregory opens with a sample of a conversation between song collector Hamish Henderson and the singer Charlotte Higgins as Lee painstakingly underlines the connection between these very modern, enlightened arrangements with an old oral tradition. It’s an important context given the unfamiliarity of some of the instrumentation, mostly featuring Francesca Ter-Berg on cello, Flora Curzon on violin, Jonah Brody on koto and Josh Green on percussion, with not a guitar in sight.
It’s almost taken as read that Lee’s singing is sublime throughout, especially on The Moss House, Moorlough Maggie and The Moon Shone On My Bed Last Night, and we even get the hint of a yodel on Lord Gregory. An album clearly made with enormous thought, love and respect that really deserves to be heard.
www.samleesong.co.uk Colin Irwin
RE NILIU In A Cosmic Ear Alfa Music AFMCD173
Thirty years ago, the first band who opened our English ears to the notion that the south of Italy had some utterly wonderful music were Cal- abria’s Re Niliu. Formed in 1979 and rooted in a lot of deep research into local tra- ditional music, by the time they reached the UK in the late ’80s they were begin- ning to head in an invigorat-
ing electric direction. They’d made a number of increasingly adventurous albums through which it became obvious that their region, right out in the middle of the Mediterranean and closer to North Africa and Greece than the main European continent, had been an historic receptor to many cultures and influ- ences which were reflected in the music. Their 1994 CD Pucambù, on which everything seemed to come together, remains a classic,
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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