Tag: He Comes In The Night

Originally available via Bandcamp and now getting a pink CD and blue vinyl release, serving as a prelude to next year’s alchemy-themed official follow-up to ‘Sorrow Songs’, Ophelia comprises recordings from various points in time, some old, some new, reflected in the flow between styles and moods. Overall, however, they fit within what she calls meditations in a hauntological folk style which, for those not familiar with the term, first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx, embraces a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.

Working with found sounds, field recordings and found or handmade instruments, among them, cutlery and bird calls as colourings to the core framework of harp, bass and guitar around which her airy, gossamer touch, often whispery vocals weave. Featuring plucked kalimba and percussive background birdsong, it opens with ‘Clouds Never Move’, a woozy pastoral track from 2020 and released in the wake of George Floyd’s death, inspired by a pre-school friend insisting with absolute confidence that clouds remained static and carrying the message of speaking our own truth. The vocals ending abruptly before a brief silence and a final snatch of birdsong.

With its wafting vocals and languid melodic drifts, ‘Ophelia’ is, of course, named for the tragic character in Hamlet, the song formed of her thoughts as she drift to her watery grave, (“floating past children who play on the banks”) staring at the sun and treetops as she leaves the bauble of the world, drowning as much in grief and sorrow as in the river and recollecting folk songs from her childhood, “will someone make harps from my bones” a nod to ‘Bows Of London’.

Backdropped by drone and the soundscape utilising knives, ‘He Comes In The Night’ is a literal haunting inspired by a suburban case involving an adolescent girl and taking in aspects of the Eros and Psyche myth, the he a restless spirit seeking communication with the living, the ‘lovely dust’ in which he leave his marks (“like a dry little kiss in my memory”) and her “heart a cavernous place” also quite possibly a nod to ‘His Dark Materials’.

Sparsely arranged for mountain dulcimer with a music box texture, ‘The Fat Lady Sings’ has its roots in Frances Cornford’s 1919 poem ‘To a Fat Lady Seen From a Train’, Morrison’s song giving her her own (eerie sounding) voice as she loses herself in nature (“sometimes I walk through fields in gloves/And as I walk, beneath my tread/Sings all nature, wild and green”) and speaking of not judging by first fleeting impressions.

Autoharp and flute organ provide the pallet for ‘Hours Of Sunlight’ (the title inspired by the Francoise Sagan novel of almost the same title, a quiet meditation on communication and (“perhaps you’ll call, and want me back/And I’ll once more pretend/I cannot hear the resounding lack/Of words that almost mend”) and the lack thereof .

Accompanied by shruti drone, ‘Bright Blessings’ is what it says, a benediction wishing someone well wherever they may wander even though you cannot walk in the path they take, while, playing a handmade music box, acoustic guitar and double bass with spectral, barely there vocals, ‘Circular Waltz’, written in response to waiting for someone who never turned up, concerns the passage of time, especially when it seems to drag.

By contrast, featuring melodica and quietly strummed guitar, the drowsy wooziness of ‘The Ghost Of A Song’ has a 6os folk flavour as, like the earlier, character, she’s visited by a ghost, here a memory of a beloved in the form of an elusive song or melody heard in a dream that fades on waking “slipping through my fingers with the gathering dawn”.

The Phil Spector girl groups might seem an unlikely influence, but, traced on autoharp, here it is in the disarmingly catchy Brill Building ghost that is ‘A Quiver In The Heart’, a song about seeing the one you love with someone else and a refrain, “you’re seven steps away from me, it might as well be years” that you could hear Ronnie Spector singing – or, indeed, her country equivalent.

In many ways, ‘I Close My Arms To You’ with its claves, autoharp and double bass, is basically the rejected lover giving the middle finger, and turning her back on a tainted embrace and, while initially “your afterimage stains my eye, no matter how hard I try”, with a little resolution she finds “the scales are falling from my eyes”. It’s probably the only song to include the word ‘dought’, an archaic term for putting out a light.

Ophelia ends with the lullaby piano and autoharp tones of the whisperingly sung ‘Almost, But Not Quite (The Astrologer’s Song’)’ in which an astrologer struggles to maintain a professional distance while crafting the chart of someone for whom he has feelings (“Smile politely, cast a glimmering eye’/I will make no sound/No-one will know that it’s your face/I wrap my dreams around”). It’s not much of a stretch to apply that to a songwriter, as anyone who’s heard ‘You’re So Vain’ can attest.

An otherworldly album of sublime shades, translucent melodies and ambient emotions, ideally to be absorbed in the silent hours where consciousness lets go of the world’s noise.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.angelinemorrisonmusic.com

‘He Comes By Night’ – official video: