Their first new material since 2017, Patch & The Giant still line-up as singer Luke Owen on acoustic guitar, Angie Rance on digital accordion, trumpet, flugelhorn, and piano Nick Harris on bass and banjo, violinist Gabriel Merryfield, and Derek Yao on cello and double bass with Tobias Humble on drums and Harris, Owen and Rance all variously playing mandolin. They’re still rooted in acoustic folk, but the intervening years and the whole Covid experience that put recordings on hold, have wrought changes, Fragments formed in the studio rather than through playing live, and several tracks taking on softer and more cinematic textures with topics embracing global warming, family and friendship, love and loss, and a warm nostalgia.
It opens though with what might be described as an almost funky folk vibe on the global warming, apocalyptic ‘Fire & The Flood’ (a phrase which also appeared on their 2014 single ‘For Gabriel’), which, underpinned by drums and pulsing violin, the verses staccato and the chorus more anthemically melodic, mingles an ominous feel in “here’s to the dead, I am the dead when your thoughts run wild” with the more upbeat “here’s to the young, God bless the young for it’s them that I trust” while the refrain line “There we’ll lye in the hearts of men, for they must know no ill” comes from Macbeth and concerns dissembling and the sample is from Wells’s ‘War Of The Worlds’.
Producer Ben Walker on electric guitar, the pulsing ‘Bones’ with Owens’ quivering vocals and the wash of doleful strings, double bass and waves of percussion deals with world-weariness depression (“The light is dying/Winter’s grip has made me sick/There’s no use in trying/I am a tired man with trouble on his mind… All my life there’s a darkness comes and breaks our waves and it drowns our song”) and but counterpointed with hope (“oh my love, there’s a lighthouse here and it brings us home and it makes things clear”) and ultimately the reconciliation that life is made of both (“I can be the candle in your home/I can be the darkness in your bones”). There’s also a vague feeling that ‘The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’ may be one of the inspirations.
Ripplingly fingerpicked with Walker on mandolin and Rance on flugelhorn ‘Mountains’ digs deep into despair, losing touch and the feeling that all is insurmountable, pointless and lost (“Mountains, all I see are mountains, taller than the road that lies ahead… When my body is ailing, is nothing worth saving?/And I’m sorry you’re lonely but the river disowns me/And the mountain is greedy for the mountain will beat me/But it doesn’t mean a thing”). The bridge is a direct lift from John Lennon’s ‘God’.
Flugelhorn again colouring alongside the violin, a gentle waltzing melody carries ‘A Lullaby For Late Night Drunks’, a pondering on such big question as “where do our bodies go when they die?” and “If I love you tomorrow, will you stay with me tonight?” that nods to Gus Khan’s 1924 evergreen ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’, that dips into existential angst (“Don’t look for the sun for the sun makes us blind/The more that you question the less that you learn/A child touches fire to know that it burns/And the most peculiar thing that I ever could learn/Is just do nothing at all”) as it sways away into the smoky distance.
Walker adding electric guitar to the acoustic, violin, cello and piano arrangement, written about Owens’ late great grandfather, ‘Birds In His Pocket’ mingles despair in the unkind night (“you lost your boats, your hopes and then your mind”) with the hope of a new morn (“rise from your bed when the dawn is a breaking, in a house where you live, in a world that is waking/And you shake of the sleep and the vow that you’ve taken …/Dream of man with birds in his pocket and he sits by the sea with a key so you unlock it and you roll away”).
With trumpet, violin and cello, the pulsing ‘Wolves In The Water’ is only 95 seconds but still manages to evoke a sense of dread in its brief lyrics (“There’s wolves in the water, looking to drown/After all that we gave them, they still hang around/All that I was then, so stark an unbound by these wolves in the water, hanging around/I thought that I saved you but you were already found/By these wolves in the water, looking to drown”) before the sudden musically explosive finale.
Fragments comes to a close with, first, the melancholic, musically undulating, slow swaying, violin caressed ‘A Lonely View’ and its lockdown-informed plea for rescue (“teach me something I don’t already know/And mother me, don’t let me leave here/A lonely view, a heart of darkness and stone”) as the silence “grows/Into a rousing song that rolls along like a stone”). Finally, a military drum beat introduces the five-minute ‘September’, Rance’s sole lyrical contribution, she and Owens on mixed back vocals for a closing upbeat note that, drawing on feelings at the end of festivals season, is about nostalgia, hedonism and yearning for what you’ve already had (“what a beautiful day/We did better than life, brought the sun down today/With our momentary madness, our fear of decay/We came further than all of us…May you always love/Travel belonging, a song for no fee/September, the end, it’s beginning to be”). Fragments perhaps, but they come together to make a wonderful whole.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.patchandthegiant.bandcamp.com
‘Bones’ – official video:
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