Taking their name from the seventeenth century Bedlam ballad “Tom o’ Bedlam’ and referencing an ancient book of strange and wylde magick) , Norfolk duo singer Leighton Melville and Tim Lane on guitar, bass and keys make their progressive rock/folk album debut with a collection of original songs delving into a world of ghosts and vampires, strange creatures and ancient magic, and forbidden love, taking musical cues from 70s classic rock and 80s Goth, and lyrical inspiration from dark folk tale, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Which should give you some idea of what to expect.
It opens with a clatter of drums on ‘I Burn’, a staccato rhythm murder ballad about an eternally damned faithless soul in thrall to the demonic lover he betrayed (“My true love lies forsaken/In a cold and lifeless grave/Buried deep where none can ever find her/And yet she sits beside me/Telling all my sin and shame/And not even death can ever bind her/She takes me in her arms and holds me in her cold embrace/‘a curse for ev’ry breath you stole from her that you betrayed’”).
The six and a half-minute incantational title track (“Catch the ever turning wind/And make a net to keep it in/Let living water flow uphill/Take the storm and break its will/And promise you will hear me/When I call”), mixing classic seventies rock influences (shades of early Yes, Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant) with the folk flavours from their work as part of the Punch House Band, has a shifting tempo structure, gathering pace in the instrumental mid-section before an electric guitar solo brings it back to a more a staccato rhythm.
Written by Melville, ‘People Of The Mountain’ is an understated ballad that combines the Lovecraftian idea of an ancient menace lurking beneath that granite landscape with his Welsh heritage (“There is danger and there are signs/In the valley and in the mines/Where the hills have more than eyes/Where your love lies”), though it must be said that the way it builds in its chorus has a more anthemic Celtic feel a la Big Country.
Another by Lane, the rhythmically punching ‘Shadow Song’ with its circling drum patterns and keyboard swirls most forcefully conjures Tull thoughts as, framed as a progressive folk rock fairy tale tells of a mysterious an uncanny maiden who uses her eldritch music to ensnare a well-intentioned traveller (“Yes I hear the music lady, hear it all too well/I fear it is no earthly tune, it is some midnight spell/With this they took to dancing both the mortal and the maid/Now he is lost forever by the shadow song betrayed”).
A ghostly ballad serenading a dead lover ‘(Come to Me) In the Cold Small Hours’ (“ Your bones are cold, and all your colours faded/Where you walk you make no mark or sound/And I remember what long had lain forgotten/What once was lost at last is found”) reins in the pacing and tone with an early Genesis mood before it closes with the 13-minute time signatures shifting four-part prog folk epic The Harlequin Rides’, propulsive guitars and percussion complementing the keys and putting into motion a story about the legendary Wild Hunt where the King of the Elves leads a pack of “Strange inhuman hunters/Out to have their sport/Howling and screaming baying for blood” in pursuit of their victim through the storm-wracked forests of the cold and coffin dark night. “Who is the seeker? Who is the prize?” it asks, underling the symbiotic relationship of the hunter and the quarry. Imagine Iron Maiden fused with Curved Air, The Enid and Fruup and you get close.
Targeted at a very specific musical demographic perhaps, but the more curious of the folk community might find themselves pleasant surprised.
Mike Davies
Artists’ website: www.timlanemusic.bandcamp.com/album/strange-wylde-majick
‘Strange & Wylde Majick’:
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