A Bath-based duo comprising guitarist Arty Jackson and lead singer and harmonium player Carys Lewin, To Keep You Warm, joined by percussionist Josh Clarke, Rob Sheldrick on fiddle and Caitlin McAndry on double bass and cello, is their debut EP. Bringing their own contemporary flavours to a traditional folk base, they weave moody and often ethereal songs about Welsh saints, Greek sinners, Cornish fairytales and Mother Nature’s power, opening with the stabbing, percussive ‘Ghost Dance’ as inspired by the Native American ceremony believed to reunite the living with spirits of the dead and taking XTC as a musical touchstone, Lewin’s voice soars and swoops across the pulsing melody changes for a song about love enduring (“Reunite our bones as echoed lovers…on these grounds where our eyes cross the vale and our hands align/I will swear you’re mine once more/Only gods can stop me, turn me backwards/…and grief won’t warm the shade/As long as you’re by my side/We are alive/All the weapons and bloodlust that crosses our lines of fate/Are dwarfed by the thought of me losing you after tonight/I could almost pray that this day last a decade”).
Their variant on the traditional ballad ‘Tam Lin’ about a knight captured by fairies, and the mortal woman who rescues him through her bravery and love, beginning with fingerpicked pulsing guitar and gradually building into a trippy progfolk sound with traded spoken words,
‘Tamlin & Joan’ is of a darker narrative hue, mixing the myth with modern concerns, echoing the original with “the moment was too right as you set your eyes upon me/I often think of it is it worth the mention/That I have wings to fly and spells to cast to make you stay” but is sung from the perspective of the fairy queen, subverting the familiar story with “You told them all you fell from your horse and i trapped you here but that’s a lie”. With a spell-like feel to “We now compel/A tithe to hell/As hot as coal A solemn gasp/Within your grasp”, phrases and lines like “When she returns I’ll tell her kindly do not pluck the double rose/The moon a stain/Against the plain/The white horse moves/A baby gained a baby lost/All of that waiting just for nothing!” serve to further thicken the symbolism. The name Joan comes from the Cornish queen of fairies Joan the Wad.
Arty taking lead vocals and Carys yelping as it heads to an end, double bass throbs into the woozy ‘I’ll Wait’, about inaction and the frustrations that come with waiting for something, rather than going for it it’s another poisoned love song (“We’re allied with the dirt above/An unwanted lazy fact/Cold trees and dead bees…I’ll wait kill time/The burning moons the sign, the sign/Just to tell me you’re out of love/I guess that i needed that”) stained with images of nature and deceit (“Turn up at the right address/Show people you mean well/And keep up an interest/Appear when they ring the bell”).
If those are cold, there’s warmth (and indeed a “human radiator”) coursing through ‘Made For Holding’ with its more positive romance vibes (“my hand it felt home/The most at home it had ever been/And you are all I’ve seen/And you are all I know/And you were made for holding… you wore my coat/As the rain it poured on down/And I didn’t mind”).
Featuring electric bass, percussion and piano, drawing on Wilco’s Muzzle of Bees’ and Blake Mills’ ‘Vanishing Twin’, ‘Hope Springs Eternal’ is an eight and a half minute fingerpicked and progressive piano coloured jazzy folk opus about optimism and celebrating the little wins that remind us we’re alive (“We live for today/There’s no time to lay/with your mistakes/Roll another die/And kiss the people you dream of at night”) and the power of love to lift you up (“the gods play my life a game/But when you hold me I know that I win/I’ll rest when I’m dead…Till then I’ll wait/For fate to name the date”).
To Keep You Warm ends with the banjo-coloured title track, a straightforward song of love, support and devotion (“I believe you are/My only love/I need to learn how to keep you warm…All of me/In use to make this cup of tea…I’ve only got this one life to keep you warm”). Feel their heat.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: https://hummtheband.wixsite.com/hummtheband
‘Made For Holding’ – live:
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