Joined by a stellar Lost Boys line-up of Jamie Francis on banjo, guitars, octave mandolin and bass, cellist Graham Coe, Evan Carson on percussion, accordionist Archie Churchill-Moss, Lukas Drinkwater behind the double bass and Toby Shaer accounting for flutes, whistles and fiddle, Dreamers Dawn is the long-awaited follow-up to 2021’s The Wishing Tree.
Save for a couple of traditionals, all the material is by Kelly and Francis, opening with their weighty, percussive arrangement of ‘The Bold Privateer’ (where he sounds a lot like Seth Lakeman) concerning a poor unfortunate press-ganged into the navy to fight against France, the verses shifting from him to the lover left behind, the closing line about him returning but being “forever trapped/On the decks of the bold privateer”, a Napoleonic War case of PTSD.
The first of the originals is the title track, a banjo rippling celebration of the good vibes of a music festival (“Before you know it, we’re all dancing like lunatics/Like conjurors with crackling fingertips/The music flowing through us like conduits… by the light of the stars, we gather like fireflies/Then rise up like valkyries, myriad into the dawn/To wage war on conformism monochrome/Trailing kaleidoscope colours”) and, indeed, the magic of live music per se.
The second traditional is ‘Gallows Pole’, a number that’s featured on a myriad of albums by folk and rock artists alike, and, as such, something of a challenge to bring anything new to the scaffold, though Kelly rises to the occasion by giving it a heady Appalachian bluegrass makeover with an urgency that feels like a thousand banjo bee strings, not to mention stripping the verses back to feature just the parents who, while they bring silver and gold, it turns out its just not enough.
The following two tracks are opposites sides to the same coin, both contemplating encounters with alien life. The slower of the two, the mandolin-based ‘In The Cold’ imagines the loneliness of thinking ourselves alone in the universe, “Turning mad as hermits on our island/In this sea of time and space” and then finding other life out there (“oh what a balm for broken souls/To gaze upon another face in the cold”. That’s counterpointed by the slightly faster-paced strum and dancing flute of ‘In The Dark’ where extra-terrestrial life turns out to not be friendly as we stumble around blind to the dangers the cosmos holds, though it doesn’t take much to read a commentary on humanity into lines like “Like children, too loud/But deaf to ourselves/Too proud, we stumbled and fell/Like children still blind to the horrors we’ve sown” and “No parents to dry our tears/No gods to stand between us and our fears/Now we’ve learnt to walk, we’ll have to learn to crawl”.
Given a scratchy, pulsing arrangement with banjo and a bluesy staccato vocal delivery, ‘Snakes And Sermons’ is about how human nature propensity for deception and deceit (“Just like a bird must take to wing/Just like a scorpion must sting”) can lead us to become entangled in toxic relationships (“Was I slow on the draw?/Bleeding from a shot that I never saw/You live long enough and you will discover/You don’t take sermons from the snake now brother”) that can prove mutually destructive (“When the river’s deep and the river’s wide/Riding your back to the other side/And though it means we both will drown/What goes will come around”), but that’s it still possible to extricate yourself (“spare me your self-loathing /A big bad wolf in a little lamb’s clothing/Did you think I’d let you in/If you just flashed another grin?/Well that’s shame on me cos you fooled me twice… pack your things and go/Pile up your lies in an old rucksack/Pull up your coat and don’t look back”).
The serpent image recurs as sociopolitical commentary enters the thematic cocktail with the itchy guitar pattern of the neurotic rhythmed ‘The Old Deceiver’ which proposes that populist nationalism, and the demagogues it gives rise to are twisted reflections of our own darkest instincts and fears (“Are you the symptom, are you the sickness?/Are you the killer, are you the witness?/Here on our knees/Would we know the difference?”) as captured in the line “And so the drop of blood becomes the seed/From seed the tree, and bitter fruit/ In the heart of paradise”.
Adopting a minstrel musical persuasion, adored with cello and fiddle, the melancholically waltzing ‘‘Til Sleep Comes Calling’ very much brings Chris Cleverley to mind, not just musically but in its theme of caring for a loved one with chronic mental health or physical health issues veined with the healing power of the natural world (“I know the sunlight can’t make it all go, but come and see the day dawning/The burdock will spring and the skylark will sing, and our beautiful world will keep turning…And I know the seaside can’t make it all go, but be with me here in this moment/The herring gull’s cry and the waves gentle sigh, might help you feel a little less broken”), closing with the poignant “I know these things they can’t make it all right, I can see your tears are still falling/But I’ll sit here with you by candlelight, and hold you close ‘til sleep comes calling”.
There’s one last original, the delicate fingerpicked ‘Skye’, a song of loss, memory and grief that opens with “Do you remember when we first walked out together?/Do you remember when your toes first touched the river?” and catches the heart with “I taught you not to be afraid/And you taught me to love so fiercely/We’d hold to each other/Rising up like smoke above the chimney tops”. The notes, however, bring a different resonance in revealing its not written about a person but an animal companion.
Dreamers Dawn is bookended by two further arrangements of much covered traditionals, firstly a mandolin plucked, drum rolling lurching rhythm ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ that again evokes Lakeman and, closing the album, a lovely five-minute fingerpicked, fiddle caressed reading of ‘Dark Eyed Sailor’, one of the rare numbers from the sailor/soldier canon about love’s return rather than parting. Coming from a family largely made up of Norfolk dairy farmers, it seems appropriate that the album should confirm Sam as among the cream of the contemporary folk crop.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.samkelly.com
‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ – live:
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