JOSIENNE CLARKE & BEN WALKER – Overnight (Rough Trade)

overnightTheir fifth album together (although 2010’s One Light is Gone was credited to just Clarke) and the first for their new label sees the BBC2 Folk Award winners expanding their stylistic horizons ever further, embracing widescreen orchestration and touches of jazz.

Featuring ten originals and two covers, it opens with the self-penned, shimmering, acoustic guitar backed ‘Nine Times Along’, a number which will doubtless spark another wave of Sandy Denny references but which actually puts me more in mind of Lesley Duncan’s version of Elton John’s ‘Love Song’. This, in turn, is followed by the spare, slow swaying ‘Something Familiar’ where she sings “Reflections at sundown, can make me so sad, for there’s no way of keeping, the day we’ve just had”, capturing the album’s titular through line from dusk to dawn.

Following a mournful violin and cello drone introduction, plucked violin joins in for the dreamily slow, traditional-flavoured leaving song ‘Sweet The Sorrow’ featuring an acoustic solo from Walker before a funereal march tempo, rumbling ‘Dawn of the Dark’, co-penned by the duo, sees Clarke’s multi-tracked vocals soar in choral wings before a recorder solo (two tenors and descant, played by Clarke) towards the close. The darkness remains for the first of the covers, an early hours under the stars version of Gillian Welch’s ‘Dark Turn of Mind’ with a simple guitar accompaniment from Walker complemented by cello.

Not entirely an original, ‘Weep You No More Sad Fountains’ is actually an arrangement of a lute ayre by John Dowland, its renaissance colours brushed with skittering percussion like mice in the skirting board. Entering the hazy borders of folk and jazz, ‘The Light of His Lamp’ has a heady, late night ambience evoked by the skeletal piano notes and metronomic ticking in the background, cello swelling in the final stretch. This, in turn, leads to ‘Sleep’, a setting of a lyric by Ivor Gurney, a suitably otherworldly feel evoked by Clarke’s pure, soaring lieder vocal arrangement.

They hit the home stretch with another cover, one previously recorded by Nick Drake, one of their obvious influences, Jackson C Frank’s ‘Milk and Honey’ that, while faithful to the simple acoustic guitar arrangement, rather than the original’s traditional folk flavours has more of a 40s torch ballad feel with sax embellishment and a brief snatch of ‘‘Tis Autumn’, a number written by Henry Nemo and popularised by, among others, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald.

There’s a nod to a different era in ‘The Waning Crescent’, a chilled jazzy pop soul number straight out of the Warwick sings Bacharach songbook, complete with electric piano accompaniment (though Burt probably would not have gone for the percussive hisses). The dreamy strings-backed title track serves as the penultimate number, Clarke’s voice again soaring up the scales, before the shadows give way to dawn and, finally (returning to those Denny echoes, but also with hints of Carina Round), the equally sparse co-penned ‘Light Of Day’ with its tranquil cello and images of rebirth, drawing to a close in a way that conjures those slow, long, sun shimmering sequences in a Terence Davies film.

The pair have never sounded or felt so confident in their music and their performance, and the result is a sophisticated, soothing and reassuring listen that will take you from the gathering shadows into the first rays of day with the soft touch of the sandman.

Mike Davies

‘The Waning Crescent’ – official video: