25/01/2025
This week on FAAB:
David Gray - Eyes Made Rain - Dear Life - Laugh A Minute www.davidgray.com
Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre - Connla - Allt, Vol II: Cuimhne - Machair Records www.juliefowlis.bandcamp.com/album/allt-vol-ii-cuimhne
Daria Kulesh - Homeland - Motherland - Independent Release www.daria-kulesh.co.uk/
The Creek Rocks - Old Bangum - Wolf Hunter - Independent release www.thecreekrocks.com
Mallory Chipman - I Am Slumber - Songs To A Wild God - Tunnel Mountain Records - www.mallorychipmanmusic.com
Tung - Everything Else - Love You All Over Again - Full Time Hobby - www.tunng.co.uk
David Gray - That Day Must Surely Come - video: www.youtube.com/
Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre - Nuar a sheas sinn - video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqELnKDHiWY
Daria Kulesh - Ignited - Motherland - video: www.youtube.com/
The Creek Rocks - Zelma Lee - Wolf Hunter - video: www.youtube.com/channel/UCTVTvGr371M5fHqzkahqWzw
Mallory Chipman - Sing Me Home - Songs To A Wild God - video: www.youtube.com/
Tunng - Snails - Love You All Over Again - video: www.youtube.com/
David Gray: "is back doing what he does better than almost anyone, and fans of complex, serious, lyrical songcraft should rejoice. Dear Life may be the deepest, strangest, loveliest album this pioneering British singer-songwriter has ever delivered. Years in the making, it is an album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. Dear Life is David Gray's 13th album. It's the result of "a starburst of songwriting"... it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind. An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date." - album description at www.lunchboxrecords.com/collections/new-releases/products/617308085419
Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre: "The music of geographically distinct places (often with common elements within national boundaries) is, of course, the source of much of our musical nourishment, but migration and travel to find work has also led to extensive inter-mingling of songs, poetry and music, not least within the British Isles. Such musical merging has particularly been the case between the musical traditions of Ireland and Scotland, and Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre – augmented on this occasion by the ubiquitous Dónal Lunny (playing bouzouki and bodhran, and co-producing) – represent a deeply rewarding and inventive sharing of those traditions. Allt Vol. II: Cuimhne, which means a memory, follows six years after their lauded, eponymous debut (see our review here).
The title track starts things off, sung as sublimely as ever by Julie Fowlis, with calming accompaniment from John’s guitar and, I assume from the deep resonance, gouzouki played by Éamon. Zoë joins on harmony vocal before adding a wistful fiddle melody. The narrator in the song – written by Scottish poet John MacLean (Julie wrote the music) – describes calling on pleasurable memories of different times of the day in preference to less aggregable conditions: “I don’t often think of storms or cold…but of calm mornings, the new sun shining…or the sultry heat of noon.’ For generations, traditional Irish and Scottish singers and musicians have made very good use of the rich Gaelic poetry tradition as a key source for songs. Like its predecessor, the album is made up of newly composed settings of Irish and Scottish Gaelic poems and tunes – the whole takes inspiration from that well of memories and recollections.
Whilst Julie has the lion’s share of lead vocals, everyone plays their part in singing on the song tracks. John sings and wrote the music for Connla, written by Pádraig Mac Seáin (Connla is a figure from Irish mythology), the melody well-suited to John’s singing, while fiddle and whistle play the tune in between verses. John’s other song, nicely framed by bouzouki, whistle and guitar, is Fidléir Ghleann Fhinne (The Glenfinn Fiddler), written by Pádraig Ó Baoighill – though it isn’t clear if the lyric refers to a real or a fictitious fiddler. It morphs into two lovely tunes – Masúrca Ghleann Fhinne / Fáilte an Fhile (Welcome the poet) – written by Zoe. Zoe also wrote the music for Suantraí Ghráinne (Gráinne’s Lullaby), written by Máire Mac an tSaoi, which she sings beautifully, with first fiddle and then whistle providing instrumental breaks.
Written by Aonghas Dubh MacNeacail, Nuair a sheas sinn is a particularly gorgeous track about emigration, as experienced by families who stayed at home. Both the melody, written by Julie and Éamon, and her vocal, are pensive, with Zoe’s fiddle accentuating the mood along the way. There’s a glorious, almost hymn-like group, a ca****la singing on Lá Róúil (A Great Day), composed by Zoe and John – the harmonies are magnificent.
A short traditional, children’s nonsense-like verse – Ó Éirich, Ó Eilidh (O, rise up, o Eilidh) – is sung by Julie in the style of a waulking song (which feature on most of her recordings), the distinct rhythm carried on bodhran and bouzouki, before two, more up tempo tunes – first Ríl Dealgan a fiddle tune from Zoe and then Sliabh na gCloch composed by Éamon – fiddle and whistle weaving in and amongst. The final track, Caim Chaluim Chille Chaoim, was commissioned from the group by the Royal Irish Academy in 2021 to commemorate 1500 years since St Columba / Colm Cille. The lyrics are based on a text from a six collection of Gaelic prayers, incantations, charms and songs collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the late 19th century, with a blessing from the Middle Irish period woven in. It exemplifies the quartet’s magical skill at blending traditions with a captivating, multi-layered arrangement of voices, guitar, bouzouki, violin and oboe. In the accompanying video, artist Ellis O’Connor creates paintings inspired by the music.
The sound on Allt Vol. II: Cuimhne is warm and organic, with a relaxed feel throughout. It was recorded at Black Mountain Recording Studios, which must have played a big part in that sonic outcome. The wood-panelled studio, owned by Peter Baldwin, is set in beautiful countryside in Dundalk, Co. Louth. Artists as diverse as Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Hozier have recorded there. The studio was intentionally modelled on the famous Fame, Muscle Shoals Sound, Sun, and Royal studios in the southern U.S.
After watching the quartet at Celtic Connections in 2022, a performance in which they were “perfectly matched in every combination,” their second album more than cements that view: it is harmonious in every aspect—magnificent vocals, classy musicianship, and absorbing airy arrangements." - Dave McNally review at www.klofmag.com/2025/01/julie-fowlis-eamon-doorley-zoe-conway-john-mc-intyre-allt-vol-ii-cuimhne/
Daria Kulesh: "MotherLand, her fourth studio album and her first since 2019, finds Daria, celebrating ten years on the UK folk scene, drawing on a myriad of life changing events in the intervening years, specifically becoming a mother and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, symptomatic of an increasingly unstable world. As such, the title pointedly stressing the two words, the songs (three of which appeared on her Eve EP) embrace themes of exile, war and protest alongside those of salvation, escape and joy, roaming from the Caucasus Highlands to Everest, Scotland and Ukraine.
Produced by and featuring multi-instrumentalist Jason Emberton (save for two tracks by Stu Hanna) with core musical contributions from violinist Katrina Davies, Jonny Dyer on guitar, mandolin, bouzouki and bass and Odette Michell on backing vocals, it opens with a deep dive into Russian history with the breathily sung steady bluesy strum and drum beat of ‘Ataman’ which, from a first person perspective, recounts the true story of Alyona of Arzamas, a spirited 17th century Erzyan woman (“a healer, a killer, a witch and a nun”) who defied both the oppressive Tsarist state and the dictates of gender to reject convent life and become the leader, their Ataman, of a rebel Cossack army. Although ultimately subdued, as she declares in the song “None could bend my bow, and I would bow to no one/Till my final breath a Cossack I will be!”.
Sung in her native tongue, that’s duly followed by her rendition of the Russian traditional ‘Cossack Lullaby’, Hanna on production duties as well as violin, bass, guitar and mandolin and Tristan Seume playing banjo, octave mandola and guitar, a gentle image of a Cossack mother lulling her baby to sleep and imaging but also fearing him growing up to go to war.
A second traditional lullaby of sorts, the six-minute plus ‘Lully Lullay’, is a steady walking rhythm, musically swirling reworking of the ‘Coventry Carol’, a dark telling of King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents that, with her added words, becomes a musing on a mother’s all-consuming need to save her child, a ‘spell song’ of protection which, in her lines “Babies unborn and mothers torn/Such is the human game/Not some mad king in his raging/Just random chance to blame” has resonance with both events in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Sustaining the thematic thread, it leads into a suitably stark, musically glowering, passionately sung cover of Dylan’s ‘Masters Of War’ and, in turn, another number about the devastation such masters create, ‘Homeland’, again sung in Russian, being her translation from Ingush of a song by Khamzat Osmiev and set to a traditional tune, previously released as a single last February to mark the 80th anniversary of the deportation of the Vai’nakh (Ingush and Chechens) by Joseph Stalin in 1944, a lament for the deportees that yet combines longing and melancholy with a driving bouzouki and drums rhythm.
The second to feature Hanna, set to a tune by Duncan Morrison with the chorus by Angus Robertson, ‘Sea To Skye’ is an autobiographical memoir of her first visit to the island as a teenager, working, under some duress, as an interpreter for the Moscow Chamber Orchestra on tour and of encountering an elderly lady called Una MacLeod, returning 15 years later to find her still living in her cottage and being given a gift of song (“You had to pass on the song/You gave me your mother’s song/A song let me sing of the sea-note’s ring/A song of the sea to Skye/A song in the storm that breaks with the morn/A song of the sea-bird’s cry… Your mother’s old song through me is reborn”), underpinning the theme of mothers, children and legacies.
Another storysong of a historical figure, the slow waltzing shanty ‘Ignited’ tells of Ignatius Sancho, a Black man who, brought to England after being born on a slave ship and initially sold to a family in Spain, found favour with the Duke of Montagu and rose from his humble beginnings to find respectability, fame and fortune in 18th century England (“allowed a voice and a vote/A man of letters, music and merit/A man of standing on foreign soil/With seven children, happily married”) as an abolitionist, writer and composer but never felt he truly belonged.
A second cover, and again featuring Hanna and Seume, the melodically chiming and suitably Scottish-sounding ‘The Summer Of ‘46’ was written in 1994 by Robin Laing about the journey of Bonnie Prince Charlie as he sought to claim a foreign land as his own, the failure of his rebellion marking the collapse of his identity with nowhere to belong and nowhere to return, chiming to its theme of his chiming with Daria’s own hiraeth or longing for home.
It ends with, first, her own ‘Rise’, a stirring, musically muscular, piano-driven tribute to those who give up their freedom and lives in the cause of higher ideals, the lyrics referencing school teacher Leila Albogachieva from Ingushetia, an Olympic athlete and the first Russian woman to reach the summit of Everest twice who vanished while climbing Elbrus to record a video plea for peace, the message being “From a seed of hope/A flower always grows/And the truth will rise!”.
Finally, she returns to traditional roots for the timely ‘Ukrainian Lullaby’ which, sung in Ukrainian with a drone backing, metaphorically tells of two spirits, Dream and Slumber, who find shelter in a sleepy, snow-clad village sharing a hut with a purring cat and sleeping baby as, in the sleeve notes, she asks “has there ever been a single night in our entire history when every baby was able to sleep peacefully, free from any danger and safe from harm?”.
Ten years ago she was the Eternal Child, today’s she’s the Eternal Mother, long may she continue to give birth to progeny like this." - Mike Davies review at www.folking.com/daria-kulesh-motherland-own-label/
The Creek Rocks: coming to Little Rock Folk Club on Sat Feb 1st 2025, "are a folk group from the Ozarks led by banjoist Cindy Woolf and guitarist Mark Bilyeu. These longtime musical collaborators worked together on Cindy's three albums of original songs starting in 2005, they married in 2013, then established The Creek Rocks in 2015. Mark is a founding member of Ozarks family band Big Smith, with whom he toured and recorded for sixteen years.
Their debut release, “Wolf Hunter,” is a collection of sixteen folk songs from the Ozarks, drawn from the collections of folklorists Max Hunter of Springfield, Missouri, Mark’s hometown; and John Quincy Wolf of Batesville, Arkansas, where Cindy grew up.
Woolf is well-known for her singular singing voice and enchanting performances of her original songs, Bilyeu for his distinct guitar sound and clever turn of phrase. Together they perform a mix of Ozark-inspired original songs and truly unique arrangements of traditional Ozark folksongs, from the fun and frivolous anthems of the hills to the hair-raising and harrowing ballads of the dark holler.
The Creek Rocks are the proud recipients of the 2024 Artist in Resonance Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. They are currently researching song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell and her 1936-37 trip to Missouri and Arkansas. A musical project based upon this research will be released in 2025." - www.thecreekrocks.com
Tunng: "U.K. collective Tunng intertwine wayward psychedelic folk influences with even farther-out electronic experimentalism. The group formed in the early 2000s around the songwriting partnership of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders, who brought in various members to fill out their creative core. Often labeled either "future folk" or "folktronica" by critics who had a hard time placing the band's sound, their found-sound sampling esthetic appeared on several singles before they released their 2005 debut LP, This Is...Tunng: Mother's Daughter and Other Songs. The band explored their digital approach to folk over the course of several albums, touring frequently and enlarging their fan base as their sound solidified. Following their 2007 album Good Arrows (released on the Thrill Jockey label), Genders stepped away from the band to dedicate more energy to family life, but he would return for 2018's Songs You Make at Night as well as contributing to the group's 2020 death-themed podcast The Dead Club and its accompanying album. 2025 album Love You All Over Again returned to the earliest version of the project's electronically fused folk sound.
Comments of the Inner Chorus
Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay began their musical partnership composing scores for softcore p**n movies, and from those audacious beginnings they soon decided to form a band that would combine Genders' gentle vocals with Lindsay's guitar playing and songwriting. To fill out their sound, the duo added more guitars as well as female vocals, turntables, programming, and other percussion. Tunng released a handful of singles in their native Britain before their full-length debut, This Is...Tunng: Mother's Daughter and Other Songs, came out in 2005 (the album was later re-released in the U.S. the following year on Ace Fu). In 2006, their follow-up, Comments of the Inner Chorus, hit shelves. By this time they were more of a collective than anything else, especially because Genders had initially opted out of performing live, the six-piece (Genders and Lindsay plus vocalists Becky Jacobs and Ashley Bates and multi-instrumentalists Martin Smith and Phil Winter) released Good Arrows the next year.
..And Then We Saw Land
Time off and touring meant four years would pass before the group returned with 2010's And Then We Saw Land, their first album without co-founder Genders. With geographical differences and family life taking precedence, Tunng would reconvene in lead songwriter Mike Lindsay's newly adopted home of Reykjavík, Iceland, to start work on their next album. Taking the jam sessions from Iceland to Dorset, U.K., and spending two weeks recording, Tunng released their fifth album, Turbines, in mid-2013. Their next record, Songs You Make at Night, would see the return of Genders to the fold as well as the reunion of the band's original lineup. The album was pieced together from various remote sessions and was released in the summer of 2018. The following year, the band issued the rarities collection Magpie Bites and Other Cuts. The compilation gathered rare material from 2004 up until 2018, mostly tracks from out-of-print 7" singles and other non-album or previously unreleased tracks. An extremely limited version of the compilation had 18 tracks that spanned two discs, where the standard release had only 11.
In September 2020, the band launched an eight-part podcast series called The Dead Club. It included discussions centered around death and interviews with philosophers, writers, and other creative figures whose work touches on themes of death. The musical accompaniment for the podcast consisted of new Tunng material that also focused on issues of death and dying, and that material was collected for their seventh studio album, Tunng Presents... Dead Club. The record was released in November 2020 on the Full Time Hobby label. It would be five years before the group released their next album, 2025's Love You All Over Again -- arriving 20 years after Tunng's 2005 debut -- and the band looked to the sound of their earliest days to inform Love You All Over Again, a return to their roots of freaky folk mixed with electronic textures. " - Tunng Biography by Marisa Brown at www.allmusic.com/artist/tunng-mn0000459463
www.mixcloud.com/FromAlbionAndBeyond/from-albion-and-beyond-250125_1
Masterful UK S/S David Gray opens each half of this week's program from his superb "Dear Life" precise lyrics, lush melodies, his best ever I think; Scots/Irish combo Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre follow on from their exquisite all Gaelic "Allt, Vol II: Cuimhne" serious ...
