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JESS WARD Stronger Than You Think Jess Ward
This album’s dedication to “all the broken- hearted and bereaved / the lovelorn and the lost / the jilted and betrayed” gives a clue to its contents. Welsh musician, singer-songwrit- er and dancer Jess Ward’s second full-length release is a visceral account of the ending of a relationship. The album’s diary-sharp intima- cy is mirrored in the microcosmic isolation of its production, with Andrew ‘Wal’ Coughlin recording, mixing and adding double bass and percussion. On Fallen, Ward’s voice and lone fiddle graphically retell the old tale of a jilted woman’s lonely suicide, while Oh Love addresses both love and grief by turns, plead- ing, “Don’t break me… Pass through me.” The centrepiece is surely Stranger In My Place, a forensic, ten-verse diorama of loss which imagines another woman in the bed her hus- band built for her, another woman’s feet “upon the spot my son was born.” Yet the resilience of the album’s title surfaces in the joyous Lay My Body Down: “We are wild and free / And happy to be / All our desire coming home in our arms.”
Fragile and strident by turns, Jess’s voice (fans of Mary Hampton and Lisa Knapp will find much to like) constructs harmonic layers against the iridescent shimmer of her Celtic lever harp. In its unflinching catalogue of grief, loss, betrayal and anger, Stronger Than You Think can be compared to Björk’s Vulni- cura; a thing of dark beauty emerging from the rawness of pain.
jesswardmusic.co.uk Clare Button KATIE DOHERTY & THE
NAVIGATORS And Then Steeplejack Music SJCD023
It may be twelve years since her last album (Bridges), but north-easterner Katie Doherty has hardly been idle. Much in demand as a composer for Northern Stage and MD for a Royal Shakespeare Company production, her return to the studio has yielded ten tracks of wildly romantic beauty. From the pain of moving on (I’ll Go Out) to new parenthood (Tiny Little Shoes), love is the dominant emo- tion. Yours, which declares, “I’d give you the hills but they’re already yours,” is one of three commissioned tracks on here, alongside We Burn (both of which featured in Novem- ber Club’s Northumbrian musical, Beyond the End of the Road) and the nostalgic Heartbeat Ballroom, written for the reopening of Wallsend Memorial Hall’s ballroom. The sound is full-bodied and baroque, led by Katie’s piano and Navigator chums Shona Mooney on fiddle and Dave Gray on melodeon. But it’s the vocals that take centre stage: Katie’s full-throated, down-to-earth tones are buffered by the swelling choruses of her compatriots. On the album’s closer, We Burn, she is joined by the cast of Beyond the End of the Road to proclaim with authority: “With joyful song we fill the air.”
katiedoherty.co.uk Clare Button
JEREMY SPENCER The Lion’s Head Jeremy Spencer
“Excellence,” according to former US Secre- tary of Health, Education and Welfare, John W. Gardner, “is doing ordinary things extraor- dinarily well.” Jeremy Spencer is a fiddle play- er from Carlow, now living in Dingle, who writes and performs jigs, reels, slides, polkas and hornpipes extraordinarily well.
Katie Doherty & The Navigators
While there are many players on the cur- rent Celtic scene who display a jaw-dropping aptitude for the mechanics of traditional music-making, few demonstrate such instinct for its context whilst still sounding original and current. Spencer’s compositions aren’t complicated things that require a ready reck- oner and a slide rule to facilitate chin stroking amongst musical academics and audiophiles, but rather are concise, joyous, propulsive and skilfully arranged tunes that impel set dancers to get amongst it. Expect to hear more than a few in a traditional session near you, very soon.
Producer and sole accompanist Donogh
Hennessy’s guitar provides all the drive, lift and subtlety that made the early Lunasa albums so essential and influential. It’s to the credit of both musicians and to the strength and variety of Spencer’s compositions that the listener’s attention never wavers across these eleven tracks of original instrumental fiddle music. Superbly recorded and stylishly packaged, this is a thoroughly excellent CD by anyone’s definition.
facebook.com/JeremySpencerMusic Steve Hunt
VARIOUS ARTISTS Here At The Fair WildGoose WGS 429CD
This double album should mean most to those who have already seen the associated show at one of last year's festivals: fortunate- ly this reviewer was one of them.
What should we call this? Is it a musical show? A ballad opera? Whatever it is, it is the sixth that Mick Ryan has come up with and he has assembled an impressive cast from across the age ranges of those involve in the English folk scene. Mick himself takes the part of an actor/manager and his role 'Vincent Crumm- les' is based, like a lot of the parts, on a char- acter from a Dickens novel, including the parts taken by Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, Alice Jones and the enthusiastic bundle of energy, Pete Morton. Others in the strong line-up include Heather Bradford and Geoff Lakeman.
Wisely, Mick has chosen Cohen, along with the others in Granny's Attic, to underpin the singing with some impressive musical arrangements.
The show is full of strong, lively melodies, some of which show a strong influ-
STRATMAN Borders Of Paradis Ankh W031-2
The cover is a cartoon of the Syrian Kurdish boy, Alan Kurdi, who was three when he drowned in 2015, being washed up on a Turk- ish beach after the dinghy in which his des- perate family were trying to make it to the Greek island of Kos capsized. The photo of the boy’s body provoked global hand-wring- ing, yet refugees and migrants are still drowning in the Mediterranean in their dozens. It’s a very inadequate response, but at least we must vote the wall-building, com- passionless bastards out, and support the heroes of our tawdry times who help those ready to risk their lives to get out of hell.
Greek musician Stratos Alimonos aka
Stratman’s response is not agitprop or punky anger, rather it’s a musical and lyrical medita- tion on our times. Musically, there’s a touch of Gong and a wide palette of styles – of which Greek traditional music is a part but also Middle-Eastern music, tango, dub and space-rock, making a shifting world-music melange.
Partly, I like it; partly I find it a bit too fond of rehashing over-used sounds. The sleeve notes are mostly in Greek but include the non-Greek lyrics and some of the credits. I like four or five of the thirteen tracks (about half of which are instrumentals), the others don’t especially grab me. There are various guest musicians but mostly it sounds like a studio project where the main creative work was on the grooves and sounds. Fave trax: Oudoo Child (with Alekos Vretos on oud) and the lovely Romanza Oriental (with Moham- mad Baqar Chughtai on vocals).
ankhmusic.gr Nick Hobbs
ence of traditional song. For example, a song in the first half, Maldini's Cure, leans heavily on Paddy's Panacea. Some of the lyrics err on the side of over-repetition of particular lines.
All the characters are such as would be found at a fair in the mid-19th century – a quack doctor, a fortune teller, a ballad seller and various show and circus people – with the celebratory nature of the event contrasted with more serious references to the Chartists and to Peterloo.
wildgoose.co.uk Vic Smith
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