KATY CARR Polonia (Deluce MDL513)

KATY CARR PoloniaCarr has clearly found herself a successful niche market. coming from a Polish-Anglo-Scottish heritage, since her third album, Coquette, she’s been focusing her songwriting on stories related to Poland. Her last album, Paszport, was based around Poland during World War II with the inspiration for the material partly derived from Polish Home Army and resistance veteran Kazimierz Piechowski. It earned her a Best Artist nomination for the Songlines Music Awards 2013, won Best Concept Album in the 13th Independent Music Awards and saw her awarded honorary membership of The Polish 1st Armoured Division.

For the follow-up, she’s again returned to Poland, the album and celebratory and not a little Kate Bush-like title track bearing the Latin name for the country (it’s also the title Elgar used 100 years ago for his composition to benefit the Polish Victims Relief Fund) and again the focus is mostly around wartime and its immediate aftermath. Indeed, the punchy, brass-fuelled ‘Snow Is Falling’, a song about the end of a love affair, has its roots in the Yalta Conference of 1945 which ceded Poland to Soviet influence.

That said, the second track is ‘When Charlie Met Pola’, her voice operatically swooping and soaring over saloon piano, accordion and clip clopping spoons in a tale about Charlie Chaplin’s meeting with Polish actress Pola Negri, enticing her to become a Hollywood star and his fiancée (they never married and she became Valentino’s lover). Love also informs the following two numbers, soured on the train rolling rhythms of ‘Got A Little Bit Of Love’ and reborn on the rocky ‘We Can Go Dancing’. As the liner notes explain, these too have deeper meanings, the former a nod to the women of the resistance and the latter concerning the country’s dedication to the concepts of freedom and nationhood.

With its lurching reggae beat, horns, electronics and Herbaliser’s Oliver Parfitt on vintage keyboards, ‘Bomba’ pays homage to the Polish mathematicians who devised a machine (allegedly but unlikely named after the ice-cream dessert) to break the German’s Enigma codes (two years before Alan Turing’s breakthrough), its designers, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, also the background subjects of the wheezing rhythm ‘The Mathematician’, the story of romance blossoming at Bletchley Park, although none of them actually ever worked there.

On the female front, ‘Jumping With Zoe’, which features electronic effects by Steve Beresford and a snatch of ‘Hejnal’, a Polish national musical motif played on bugle, commemorates General Elzbieta Zawacka, the only woman to jump with elite Polish parachute regiment, the Cichociemni, while, Carr’s vocals spiraling down the scales, the piano-trilling ‘Christine The Great’ concerns another Polish heroine, Krystyna Skarbek, a former Miss Poland who became the first female agent for the Special Operations Executive and Churchill’s favourite spy, as well as the inspiration for James Bond’s Vesper Lynd.

Elsewhere, the jaunty, brass flushed and reggae rhythmed ‘My Beloved General’ nods to Stanislaw Maczek, one of the leading Allied commanders who, when the war ended, was stripped of his citizenship by the new Communist regime, refused a military pension by the British government and ended up working as a barman in Edinbugh, the lurching ‘Mr. Trebus’ refers to the Polish veteran who, remaining in Britain, became a compulsive hoarder and was featured on the A Life of Grime TV documentary, while, accompanied by clavinet, the displacement-themed ‘Quo Vadis’ takes its inspiration from the book by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Displacement and exile also inform the folksy ‘Poland Calling Polonia Home’, itself inspired by the mother and daughter Greek myth of Diameter and Persephone, and, rather obviously, ‘Exiles’, a piano waltzing instrumental homage to those who have kept the flame and spirit of Poland alive over the centuries, a notion that also lies at the heart of ‘Hands Of Time’.

Featuring BJ Cole on pedal steel and electronic insect noises by Beresford, the album ends with another instrumental, ‘Red Wine’, inspired by a Polish TV series about a woman in post WWII Warsaw who has turned to drink in grief over her lover, killed in the Uprising of 1944.

The history of wartime Poland and the contribution of its people to defeating the Nazis remains a largely untold story (the Poles were the only nation not celebrated in the 1946 Victory Parade), but, thanks to Carr, it is no longer going unsung.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: http://katycarr.com/

‘Polonia’ – the official video:


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