An alt-folk duo with former Grand Union member O’Grady on guitar, vocals and flute and White on banjo, joined here by Ed Hopwood on harmonica and jaw harp, Stop Frame Animation kicks off with the sprightly picked title track that uses the film technique to capture a fracturing relationship (“You move like stop frame animation//Flickering off, flickering on… I used to know, someone by your name/But everything must go/The film is melting frame by frame”) of which “the memories are more brass than gold”.
A repeated urgent guitar phrase underpins ‘On Hacka Tor’ (wherever that might be) with its unsettling images (“All scarred and set and crooked bone/Over the brow of the hill, they sang/lurch and leaping , moor and stone …a dance macabre right up to the ridge …A hollow man, a hungry child/A howling wolf, a lamb defiled/All of them following, shepherded by you”) before Ben Walker joins on guitar for the vaguely calypsoish-flavoured break-up number ‘Thistledown And Wind’ and yet more less than upbeat lyrics (“The fruit looks beautiful on the tree/But it’s bitter…. as a gall…Oh how horrible /You say/A life without old friends/Oh how terrible/To quit the race before it ends”).
Themes of isolation and percolate ‘House-bound Hobo’ with its witty line of being “Scott of the attic”, trapped in lockdown domestic “mountains of ice” again laced with the bitterness of a relationship loss (“Your memory’s an ice-shard… I remember the last time/You came up to see me/We skated away/For the Great East Siberian sea/Now you’re not around, I travel by TV/They look pretty small, but the sunsets are all free”) as, paraphrasing Captain Oates, he sings “I’m not going out…But you are”.
Dabbled by banjo with a jumpy rhythm, ‘Dynamite’ is a happier ditty about a couple hooking up at a circus but then you get ‘Charlie Brown’ which draws on the cartoon strip for a song about communication breakdowns (“Is there a sock inside my mouth?/Can you hear a muffled sound”).
The halfway point’s marked, flute offering solo, by the bluesy and circular rhythm of ‘Emptiness Will Free You’ which, with its image of expansive nature (“heather blooms across the moor roses grow around the door”) and songwriting references (“Number one you write a song/Number two they sing along/Number three you find the final verse turns out wrong”) has a more positive message than the title suggests (“you learn in time it’s just a ride/unhappiness will pass you by/and emptiness will free you in the end”).
Things continue in pretty much the same musical and pastoral/bucolic vein as it heads to the end, mournful banjo charting return and reunion (possibly in death) with ‘Her Long Home’ (“the man that she had known is waiting where she started from, her lost home”), Walker bringing mandolin to the choppy rhythm of ‘Stars Float On Water’ where Carthy and Pentangle influences dance together amid images of renewal (“Headlights have swept the rain/Cleaned the streets like new again/Of cigarettes and gutter shame…The rain has gone/Washed the town, the stars, they float on water”), a sensibility that carries over into the spirits rejuvenating weekend of ‘Sunday Night’ (“On Saturdays I dream/In parks and squares we lie/On Saturdays I watch, the clouds up in the sky/Cause there’s nothing better to do/Than seeing you on Sunday night”).
It ends, steeped again in nature imagery of turf and clouds as a winter evening loses in, with ‘The Furrowed Sky’, a staring over parting song (“Your eyes reflect the frozen stars/It’s time for us to go”) that conjures Robert Frost or Thomas Hardy as he sings “muddy road and cinder track/Cut dark through fallen snow/ The lantern-sun from on crooked trees/On silver grass, hangs low”, bidding “Goodbye from me and goodnight to you/The world’s a new page of snow”. To borrow from the title, tinged more with Henry Selick sadness than Nick Park joy it may be, but this is well worth running through your musical projector.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.simonogrady.co.uk/
‘Come Next Spring’ – live:
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