When not tending the flock as the Bishop of Ramsbury, Rumsey has a parallel career in pastoral pysch-folk with a previous album and EP to his name as well as being part of the Tremulant project by Ghostwriter alongside Suzy Mangion and Michael Weston King.
Taking its title from a solution of nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol variously used as a surgical dressing, in theatrical make-up and on photographic plates and recorded over the course of a single day in St Matthew’s Church in Wiltshire, Collodion is a musically sparse work with instrumentation limited to acoustic guitar, organ and double bass but also rich in melody to which he brings warm and slightly husky vocals.
It opens in drone manner with the fingerpicked guitar and cascading vocals notes of ‘Eunice Winds’, titled for the 2022 storm and sung in the voice of a fallen fir tree contemplating its fate (“All my strength has blown away…sawn into a spine I’ll be”), to be followed by the strummed ‘The Memorial Service Orders Of Friends’ on which, recalling perhaps early Roy Harper, he draws on liturgical imagery as “seated in the congregation/We can feel the implication/Mortal as the flesh upon our pew” as the mourners reflect on their “souvenir of loss”, the lyrics managing to namecheck Renaissance composer William Byrd, T.S. Eliot and new wave outfit The Adverts in the same line.
Sparsely but resonantly strummed, ‘Instead Of A Heart’ speaks of emotional voids and distancing, both towards (“Parallel lanes, two chevrons apart/Or maybe it’s just that pumping hurt/Instead of a heart”) and from (“Maybe you spoke and no one could hear/Maybe you asked, with no volunteer/Or maybe there’s nothing there, my dear/Instead of a heart”) others.
Titled for the village in South Gloucestershire, the urgently strummed ‘Iron Acton’ rides a stream of consciousness with images such as “a layby with tea van/There’s a stag’s head by a sad man…Is he fretful or sciatic?” and a “Telecaster top of a sun, spilling over the stile, hazy/
With a little lustre then I’ll feel the day has begun, maybe/There were berries for our mealtime/And the cream dripped through the red wine”.
Bridging the album’s two halves, ‘Mattins’ is a 30-second poem which, while the title refers to morning prayers is more rather a bucolic recollection of disturbing some woodland creatures in the dawn mist (“Chestnut leaf ears, three pairs, pert above the meadow line… Faces of bleached wood they have and leave like fluent prayers or water from a sluice”). Dark and thickening traditional-hewed 60s folk with twangsome guitar provides the mood setting for ‘Hooded Crow’, the opening lines of it “pecking out the seeds we’ve sown/Nesting in my chimney stack” and that “there’ll be a reckoning after the night is over” setting up the bird’s associations as a harbinger of disaster (“any moment, I know/He could just tumble down/With rioting of inside wings/Jam the fireguard firm”) and death (“Is that you at my shoulder, hooded crow?”). In contrast, ‘Twice Is Apology’ is of a quieter, madrigal-like minstrel demeanour, its poetic lyrics of contriteness in the aftermath of an argument evoking metaphysical poets such as Donne, Marvell and Herbert (“This kiss is just to dress the wound/Where words were sharply thrown/Held into a cold compress/A gesture to atone…Soothing you with two-day wine and Gethsemane flowers”).
English and American folk pull together for the steady walking rhythm ‘Pulling On A Thread’, the lyrics employing water imagery as they explore the pull of a relationship. (“here’s a restless tow that’s tugging at my bed”),referencing both ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ (“I’m Bathsheba in the Yeo”) and ‘Twelfth Night’’s duped Malvolio (“Affecting all the worst lines”) while “I chose swimming in the sea/the Kimberlin and me” serves a double meaning as both the underground cavern in Portland and a Dorset terms for an outsider. For trivia seekers, “ellipsis is a coastline” refers to the so-called coastline paradox whereby the boundary between land sea stretches to infinity, Rumsey out walking the dog on the beach (“Over there, a silhouette of huts lies/Pulpit stair, a cigarette and teal skies/Let the lead slip slow/She’s pulling on a thread – or found another scent”) and seeking a sea change (“Change the song and play me all the B-sides …let the fifth wind blow, and carry us ahead”).
It ends on Monday night on Guernsey at St Peter Port with the echoingly fingerpicked, reflective title track where those photography allusions come into focus with a touching poignancy of memory and loss as he sings “Wet the plate, collodion will let the image swim/Till you barely know its him/Develop all my negatives within”.
At barely 20 minutes, Collodion is on the short side but many of his peers would struggle to capture the workings of the human heart, mind and souls in twice that.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.andrewrumseymusic.bandcamp.com
‘Iron Acton’:
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