MARINA FLORANCE – Shadows (own label)

Her fifth album, Shadows, comprising four studio tracks with fiddle and bass and mandolin, one live, two spoken-word and one mix of spoken-word and vocals, is a familiar mellow folk and American-tinged affair with songs that touch on the personal and political. It’s love and comfort on the dancefloor that, with a namecheck for Pat Benetar’s ‘We Belong’, sets things in motion with the folksy guitar, fiddle and piano ‘At the Start’ (“Though there’s a pain embedded in your heart/we can dance it away”) where she evokes a female McTell.

The scene shifts from dancefloor to a hospital ward with, again with guitar and piano, the spoken ‘A Few Days In May’, a whimsical take on ‘nil by mouth’ that shifts from “The tea trolley came, ‘tea’ the tea trolley person enquired?/She didn’t respond apart from a raised eyebrow to the sign above her head” to the idea of how silence can be a refuge when communication proves hard (“I may never talk again she thought and smiled a little inside/sometimes words are hard/So, each time, for these few days in May, when she was spoken to and a response expected, she simply raised an eyebrow to the sign”), with the amusing lines “After a while she perfected her non-verbal responses with the raising of one, sometimes two eyebrows, the shrug of one, sometimes two shoulders, hands: palms out, with the twist of her mouth or just a tired look upwards towards the sign”. There’s a lovely punchline too, but I’ll leave you to discover.

Featuring a melancholic fiddle, ‘Home Bird’ is a country duet with Marie Saunders that mingles the thought of stretching your wings and flying into the unknown with the tug of the security in what you know (“doubts and elation filled my mind, well, how I longed for the four walls I had left behind so I put away my wings and in a box they lay on a bed of red crushed velvet there they will remain”).

Accompanied by fingerpicked guitar, the second spoken track, ‘The Shiny Shoe Lady’ is about a woman she regularly sees out and about and who somehow lifts her spirits (“she caught my attention a few years ago now …shiny silver trainers, snowy white hair, determined step, she looked like my mum…I waved as if I knew her, she smiled, waved back…years later we repeat the ritual … old friends who have never spoken/I call her the shiny shoe lady, I wonder what she calls me”).

Again of a folksy persuasion with fiddle, piano and a circling mandolin pattern and instrumental break , ‘Shadows’ is about mental health and bipolar mood shifts from euphoric highs to how “the shadows cast their spell…and you know them so well” as she sings “you ask me if I could change a thing and you look me straight in the eye/but I don’t answer/no I don’t say a word/I turn/I look away”.

A third spoken track, the deceptively titled ‘Blue Skies’ is the album’s protest number, one with a particularly timely resonance as she asks “how do they sleep at night/the decision makers/covered in blood stained cloth…birds fly across their blue skies/missiles fly across yours…indifferent to condemnation/a rogue state doubles down/turns the other cheek/the one rampant with rage…having lost all humanity/they unleash their revenge”.

Another protest track with lyric nods to Seeger and Donovan, originally a studio duet between Florance and co-writer Richard Pierce about how the lies and greed of despots are making the world, where we once took peace for granted (“we didn’t see the warning signs/as we held our eyes closed/the bombs, the blood, the loss of meaning/the hate, the deaths, the grieving”) increasingly unstable, ‘Without Goodbyes’ gets a solo fingerpicked guitar accompanied live outing that tenderly captures the song’s rueful melancholy

Fiddle akimbo Shadows ends in musically upbeat mood with the bluegrassy ‘Every Colour Of Your Rainbow’ and it’s message about holding to the things that pull us through (“make your bed when the sun is shining/lay in the sun when the grass is green/hold on tight to the loves that love you/they can give you what you need”) and of support in times of need (“all the time that I’m around/you will never walk alone/chase every colour of your rainbow/and I’ll be here when you come home”). Then, “when the time comes for leaving/well I’ll place a smile and wave goodbye/close the door behind you/fold in half and cry”.

Exclusively available on Bandcamp, Marina writes “if you find that you like one or two of them then I’m winning”. She should take a victory lap.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.marinaflorance.bandcamp.com

 

 

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