Nine years on from The Truth And The Lie, the trio return with both a new line-up, Haley Glennie-Smith replacing Charity Hair alongside husband and wife Ally McErlaine and Shelly Poole, and a new sound that’s more rooted in traditional English folk, albeit with a smattering of Americana.
Poole and Glennie-Smith’s voices entwining, arranged for piano, strings and fingerpicked guitar, the album opens with ‘Stones And Brambles’, a folksy rippling song about supportive friendship (“There’ll be trouble out of our hands/But I’ve got you my friend/Like you had me back then /And forever your friend I am”). A similar theme, along with that of resilience and finding strength, underpins ‘Kings Of Better Things’ (“I’m with you if you need to leave/Oh but sometimes you’ve gotta be brave enough to go”) along, as the title suggests, with the hope of things improving even if “keeping faith is so much harder than yesterday”.
A trio co-write, ‘I Found Angels’ uses the metaphor of trying to break wild horses to speak of finding grace in nature in times of frustration and anger when life is at its most testing (“ I packed up my things and I took them to places/Where I tried to feel change dragging my things behind me/When nature had already given me all that I needed/And the study of small things is never ending”) and of a search for a palpable faith (“I’ll be looking all of my life/For a god I can feel not just wish it could be true and to finally know where I want to come back to/The meaning eludes me though I keep on searching/When I look up with guilt/I find angels”).
Opening a cappella before resonant twanged guitar sets in, Joe Hammill joins to add his deep vocals to the call and response ‘Utah’, one of the more Americana-toned tracks and a song about restlessness and, again, a quest to find purpose (“My smashed-up suitcase of mementos just says it all/And I think I may have lost the map of Utah/I’m trying find something/Worthy to save/But today I really need to feel a force like I’m moving forward/And I don’t even care if I get back get to Utah”) and the changes we undergo as we seek new paths (“You’re not the same person that you left home as…I’m sorry daddy I’ll always be a drifter…I’ll leave my things at the side of the road…I’m ready for a new heart”).
Things are stripped back for ‘Platform 5’ which, written by Glennie-Smith, brings folk influences very much to bear in what is basically a cityscape snapshot of an early winter Willesden morning (though whatever the lyrics might say, there are no mountains), waiting for her train and taking in the cold air and breathing out “tiny clouds” like “magnetic poetry”. It’s very much the euphoria of being alive.
Although credited to Poole and McErlaine, ‘Two Magicians’ is, of course the folk traditional (here several verses shorter) about a woman resisting the amorous advances of a blacksmith, the pair engaged in a jolly chase around the countryside as they shape shift into different forms before he finally gains her maidenhead as she transforms into a bed and he the eiderdown covering her.
A less combustible relationship is the subject of the no commitments friends with benefits (“the melding of hearts but without chains… And I like it that you/Don’t wanna judge me or keep me/And I’ll never ask you to marry”) chugging rhythm title track (“You’re the man I call when the bottle breaks/When the hazy gin eyes can’t see anything straight/I’ll never smash your heart up like a China plate/Let’s just soothe each other baby/Won’t you stay for a late misty morning”), which charts folk rock musical territory marked out by early Richard Thompson.
Calming it down musically and again with an Americana mien, ‘Stars Turn Cold’ is of a different emotional persuasion, a song about forever nursing heartbreak for an ex-lover long after they’ve moved on (“I look for silver linings/But they’re really hard to find/After the sun burns out/You’ll be still be on my mind/In whoever’s arms you lay down/And wherever my life goes/I’ll be there loving you/Til the stars turn cold”). There’s a definite touch of Baby Reindeer about how, even if they find a man, marry and raise a family “when I’m old and all my memories are fading/Your face will appear to me and I’ll still have that longing”.
Past love and roads not taken, though without regret, also hang over the circling strum and echoey chimes of ‘Pool Party’ (“It was all so perfectly right and that’s why I didn’t marry him …It was there at the pool party we sensed goodbye/Nothing was said /We just felt it”), the song capturing that feeling that you know things aren’t right but can’t really explain (“maybe the water is warm/And It should feel so good to cover me/But as the light shimmered on everyone/I got the urge to run”) as you take one last dive.
It ends on another downbeat relationship note with ‘Cut Me Down’, here about wanting but failing to win someone’s affections (“all I try do is praise you/I know I’m not getting it right”) and just being “Like a lover at the weekend/But nothing more” and ending up on “an endless highway/Of craving other worldly love”.
Not, perhaps, an album overflowing with hearts and roses and happy ever afters, then, but even so a very welcome new dawn, and, to quote Ray Davies, “Everything is lovely/In a misty morning glaze”.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.redskyjuly.co.uk
‘Stones And Brambles’ – official video:
We all give our spare time to run folking.com. Our aim has always been to keep folking a free service for our visitors, artists, PR agencies and tour promoters. If you wish help out and donate something (running costs currently funded by Paul Miles), please click the PayPal link below to send us a small one off payment or a monthly contribution.
Thanks for stopping by. Please help us continue and support us by tipping/donating to folking.com via
You must be logged in to post a comment.