SOUL SURMISE

MARTYN JOSEPH - HERE COME THE YOUNG

I might have said before but a Martyn Joseph comes guaranteed to be a collection of good songs. For thirty years he has not let me down.

The trouble with his consistent consistency is that you can become complacent. I listened to Here Come The Young and ticked the box of another good record.

Then I listened again. It might have even taken the third listen before I heard on of Martyn Joseph’s best records yet .

Now, that doesn’t mean it has the very best songs though it might have. This Glass has already been a main stay of his lobe show for a couple of years now. I can hear Loves Majority being around for some time and Driving Her Home To London might replace the classic Cardiff Bay as a grown up version of a song from father to child. 

What lifts Here Come The Young above Martyn’s twenty previous albums is Gerry Diver. In the most modest of touches Diver from a very folk tree background, he studied under Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, an Irish music legend for goodness sake, adds deft touches of banjo, mandolin and particularly violin.

Diver’s folk sounds are unmistakable but they never gets in the way of the songs or ever makes you feel that this is Martyn Jospeh’s trad record. That is the genius. There are noises here that you will never have heard on a Martyn Joseph record. They add beauty, drama and intrigue. Yet it is still a Martyn Joseph record. 

To be fair Pete Flood’s drums and percussion deserve a shout put too. Almost an acoustic guitar record gets some beats that lift the songs with energy.

Whatever journalist in Melody Maker suggested that Martyn made Leonard Cohen sound like Julie Andrews simply wasn’t listening. on this record the glass is, as the song suggests half full. A songwriter often bemoaning American Presidents and British police might have been tub thumping here but no... it is a record full of hope. 

Martyn is particularly taken by the young. The title track looks across the world to Malala campaigning for girls education in Pakistan or the youth in America protesting gun laws or the school children in Europe leaving school to campaigning for environmental issues. 

If you are looking for hope some of these might do you very well indeed. There is a lot of active hope. across these songs.  Where there is hope Martyn Joseph is singing.

BRIAN HOUSTON - HANK

I don't like the sound of old recordings. Elvis is the first records I can take. It’s a hindrance as I love the songs of Woody Guthrie, early Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. I am always at the mercy of people covering their songs to be able to fully enjoy them.

For Hank Williams songs, I loved the Timeless Tribute album with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams among others. It was good…

…. but Brian Houston has trumped it. Oh maybe some of you will argue with me over versions, though actually Houston covers a lot of different songs. For me Houston’s Hank is better because of its sense of wholeness. There is a consistency to how Houston executes the collection.

Brian Houston will tell you about hearing the music of Hank Williams, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, from his dad's reel to reel tapes, when he was around six years old. At the same time his mate Bobby introduced him to Elvis. Houston’s dad hated Presley but Brian, and his brother Mark, would be lifelong fans.

Being a committed fan of Elvis would lead Brian to The Platters, doo wop and soaring Gospel. Brian attests to being one eyed on this Presley sound until Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan “muddied the waters”.

What Houston has done on Hank is to sneak back through that mud and find the cleanest vision of sound. He takes his father’s country Williams and runs them through his mate’s Presley. Houston doesn’t have the same voice as Presley but he does use his voice in similar ways - the purity, the dexterity, the emotive reach. 

Hank is a beautiful thing. 

 

Brian Houston is performing Hank at Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival on March 10th... TICKETS HERE

KEN HADDOCK - ONE NIGHT IN WILLOWFIELD

Ken Haddock is a rare gem in the musical crown of Belfast, a city whose crown is way above average in its number of precious stones.

Ken just shines. As a human being, he is an utter pleasure to be in the presence of - warm, gracious and humble. 

That humility is written in capital letters all over his music career. He has a website but that is for his photography! He’s only released two albums and an ep. Haddock has been playing residencies in Belfast bars for twenty plus years with no seeming desire to seek anything beyond the city limits. Either he is too laid back, lacking in any desire for stardom or has no idea just how good he is.

One Night In Willowfield is a declaration of just how good he is. It is a beautifully intimate recording of a man who sounds like he is his front room playing to his mates. Needless to say that Haddock has added no overdubs. It is as it sounded on the night. What he did add to the evening was the Acro Quartet with some gorgeous string arrangements. Ken’s band are pretty tasty too.

Yet it is Ken Haddock that shines. That voice. So soulful. Van meets John Martyn. One moment  vulnerable, the next moment brawn. Every moment emotive. A well aged whiskey would sound like this. As he sings you feel that you are hearing experience of life and heart and soul.

When you are doing residencies you’ll always need the cover songs. Over the years Ken Haddock has become a talented interpreter. He eeks the spiritual out of Bruce Cockburn’s Southlands Of The Heart, gives REM’s Losing My Religion a fascinating arrangement and interesting setting, though it is not technically about religion, and best of all, a poignant Both Sides Now. Oh my!

Yet, maybe most surprising for a guy as parochial as Haddock is the strength of his own songs. Word By Word, Diamond Girl and Day That Never Came just three highlights in this set.

Dare I suggest that the setting of a Church suits the work of Ken Haddock. Those lines in Word By Word - “We felt the world turning below us, in silence/A reverent hush as we made our holy embrace” - betray a sacredness in his writing. Having grown up in Church, Ken probably frequents it a lot less these days. Some might suggest that that made his faith smaller but I wonder if Ken is presenting God as bigger!

A wonderful night in Willowfield!

you can buy One Night In Willowfield at Jack's Cafe, Eastside Visitor's Centre, CS Lewis Square, 402 Newtownards Road, Belfast

 

KARINE POLWART (with Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson) - LAWS OF MOTION

Karine Polwart’s Laws of Of Motion has the breadth of sky, the depth of earth and the length of history all cram packed into ten of the most imaginative, literate songs you’ll hear any where, any year. This is a record of audacious ambition.

Polwart is still no doubt anchored in the genre of folk, where she is a perpetual award winner, but she swims in various different musical seas. Think Joni Mitchell adventurous folk more than Joan Baez.

Laws Of Motion, with Steven Polwart’s guitar and Inge Thomson’s accordion, throws out varied mood and atmospheres. It’s heavy and dark, it is light and bright. It has all the reality of wars past and an imminent nuclear attack in the present and all the hope of a better day. 

Laws of Motion is very much grounded in Polwart’s Scotland, a land where she should be crowned poet laureate and a national treasure. Yet, we find ourselves in Bologna, Yokohama and Nazi Europe, then back on Lewis, in Muckhart and and hiding from nuclear fall out in Grangemouth. 

All across the various landscapes, there are birds flying (there are always lots of birds with Karine Polwart), people migrating and refugees seeking out some better place. 

The songs on Laws Of Motion bring insight into the state of chassis that our world is in politically, economically and environmentally yet deals with it with tender compassion and a rock hard resilience. 

Indeed that resilience is as old and hard as the rock of Lewis, an old sage that knows it will outlive one of its off spring, Mary Ann McCloud’s son, now 45th President of the United States of America, and throws out its judgement upon him! I Burn But I Am Not Consumed is an astonishing spoken word achievement; funny, wise and enlightening. 

I cannot get enough of it. Polwart’s voice. Her use of words. Her versatility of rhythm and rhyme. Her deep humanity. 

Last time we spoke Karine was supporting Martyn Joseph in Belfast. Martyn speaks a lot about songs as companions for the road. Karine Polwart has given us a gang of such companions ending the piece with the mantra, “we are going to be survivors”. I’m hearing you Karine.

SPRINGSTEEN ON BROADWAY

In his two and a half hour Broadway Show, performed at The Walter Kerr Theatre, five nights a week for over a year, Bruce Springsteen speaks a lot about his magic trick. That trick is conjuring songs out of racing cars when he couldn’t even drive and working in a factory when he had never seen the inside of a factory. He doesn’t mind admitting that he was very good at the sleight of hand!

Yet, when Springsteen speaks of being at the very top of his industry he isn’t speaking from ego. He is merely using the same eye for detail that his songs have evoked for forty five years. When he speaks of his success it is merely fact. From that fact he is actually very deprecating, making himself vulnerable in his honesty about who he pretended to be, foolishly thought he wanted to be and how the boy who spent the first ten years of his career singing songs about getting out of his home town, now lives ten minutes from it. 

There can be no better evidence for the brilliance of his magic trick than this Broadway performance, a walk though his life and career, a live reading almost of his powerful autobiography Born To Run. What Springsteen does here is maybe as remarkable as anything he has ever done. You can understand a band with the players he wrapped round him, to play the songs he wrote, captivating a stadium with their tightness, jamming, extended instrumental flourishes and a front man gallivanting all over the stage. 

Stand in a theatre on your own for two and a half hours and talk. That’s a trickier prospect. He tells us about his mum and dad and the tree outside his house growing up. He tells us about driving a car across America without knowing how to shift gears. He tells us about the Big Man joining the band. Even the songs are not only stripped back of instrumentation but they are almost at times spoken, the melodies not even what matters. He only moves from guitar to piano. 

You are transfixed to the screen. You never take your eyes or ears off him. Yet, without much dramatic effect in body moves, The Boss pulls it off like some less spectacular Houdini or Blondin. A magic act indeed!

As friends who had seen it before me suggested, I was very taken by the storyline. Not that it surprised me. I have been talking this storyline since I wrote a chapter in my book The Rock Cries Out back in 2003. For me Bruce Springsteen’s life and music is a modern day telling of Jesus’ parable of The Prodigal Son.

In this Broadway production Bruce tells the tale. A son brought up in family and faith needs to get a way. He feels he is Born to Run and that there is a Promised Land that he needs to find. He finds it but in the end loses his hatred for the father he left behind and ends up back home, where it is all familiar and not at all as bad as it had seemed when he was too young to know what it was he was looking for.

“I grew up surrounded by God,” Springsteen tells his audience early on. His house was a stones throw from the Church, though he makes it very plain that he was bored and maybe even a little smothered by it. In my chapter in The Rock Cries Out I call Springsteen the Prodigal Son returning but say that I am not sure where he is in Jesus telling of the story. That was 2003.

On Broadway in 2018 Bruce Springsteen gently testified to where he is, the story comes right back round and, over two hours in, Bruce is back outside the doors of that Church reciting The Lord’s Prayer. Oh my!

Springsteen On Broadway is a phenomenal performance. Springsteen takes his own particular story, a story that fascinates millions of fans. In the telling of that story because people are intrigued by it, he opens up all our stories. As you listen you are constantly asking about your own dad and your own mum, your own youth, your own dreams, your own marriage and your own faith. You are asking how you see the world and war and peace and justice. 

Like a preacher, or I would say parish priest, Springsteen shines the light of the spirit onto the souls listening to a rather long homily where God is not so much explicit most of the time as implicit but at the end becomes just that… the end of the journey! 

GRETCHEN PETERS - DANCING WITH THE BEAST

As if the brilliant album Blackbirds was not enough, Gretchen Peters has outdone herself with an even more brilliant collection of songwriting in this year’s Dancing With The Beast.

Peters is the storytelling songwriter in paradigm who delivers in a voice that holds your attention without ever having to over do the drama already present in the songs. It is an album that deals with disorientation, isolation, insecurity, vocational weariness, political lies, between the lines of carefully crafted and beautifully delivered stories of a 12 year old killer, a truck stop prostitute, a female adolescent in love, a nation in turmoil, a dead mother returning in a dream with a cup of tea and the singer herself as she deals with being on the road and needing sabbatical sorbet time when she comes off the road.  

Gretchen Peters has made a name in songwriting noir but Dancing With The Beast is not without hope and grace and love. Lowlands, that tackles the doom and gloom so many American feel at the election of President Donald Trump, is dark but there are chinks:

 

“So I spend a lot of time here in the lowlands 

Me and all my friends we're makin' do 

We get a lot of clouds here in the lowlands 

But now and then a little light gets through” 

 

When she played a gig in Fitzroy in 2015 Peters seemed to wonder whether some of her songs fitted in Church. Every human story and all human feelings have a place in Church whether to be redeemed or to be given more prayer to fly. On Dancing With The Beast I love the way she takes these stories home. 

 

Say Grace is a song of self forgiveness:

 

“Say grace - say grace 

Forgive yourself for all of your mistakes 

You can start all over if that's what it takes 

Come inside and set yourself a place 

And say grace”

 

The closing Love That Makes A Cup Of Tea was apparently inspired by a dream when Gretchen’s mother, who passed away in 2016, came back to make her a cup of tea. It is a song in which Peters exposes love that isn’t really love before picking out one of the apostle Paul’s spiritual gifts in Romans 12, hospitality, and then conjures a perfect image of the real love that all of us could do with and give out:

 

“But there is love that makes a cup of tea 

Love that loves both who you are and who you want to be 

Love that waits for you when you fall behind 

That's the kind of love I hope you find”

 

I love a good song and Dancing With The Beast is full of good songs. Some are even co-written by Glenarm bard Ben Glover. Can we claim this is an Irish record!

VAN MORRISON - ASTRAL WEEKS

50 years ago Van Morrison’s iconic record Astral Weeks appeared like the rarest of meteorites appearing in a night sky without warning. It is an acoustic, ambient blues and jazz fusion with pain, death, love, romance and transcendental yelping that draws from a legacy of Woody Guthrie, evangelical Christianity and a transvestite called Madame George… among many other things.

Within the eight songs of the record’s genius it is easy to trace the themes that would keep Van Morrison in muse for the rest of his career; childlike visions, his Belfast upbringing, religion and these continual moments of spiritual epiphany even in the middle of dark nights of the soul. As you listen to Astral Weeks you can feel one young man’s pain and as you are pulled into the slipstream and viaducts of his dreams you journey with him towards redemption. 

In the midst of the common and most ordinary Van Morrison captures a vivid vibrant vision of the sacred and holy. Morrison does for the Belfast streets of Cypress Avenue, Fitzroy Avenue and Sandy Row what William Blake did for London two centuries before him. Morrison gives them transcendence, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Almost twenty five years later, in a song called Hyndford Street, Morrison calls it dreaming in God. 

1968 was an antithesis of 1967’s Summer of Love. Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Students and police clashed in cities across the world. The war in Vietnam and protests against it were escalating. There was a horrendous famine in Biafra. Northern Ireland was on the verge of The Troubles.

Morrison himself was going through it. Them, the 60s band that had given him his break, was over. He had moved to New York in a dubious record deal with Bert Berns who then died but not before making Brown Eyed Girl a hit. Berns wife then threatened getting Morrison deported until he fulfilled the 36 songs left on his contract. He recorded mostly nonsense songs! 

In the middle of a world exploding and his career imploding Morrison recorded an utterly beautiful and uniquely soulful album that garnered the social and personal pain around and within him and came out the other end with rebirth and redemption.

There was nothing like Astral Weeks and there has been nothing like it since. Morrison would later sing that he came to give us a sense of wonder, to lift a fiery vision bright. That is what he does here. 

From the same East Belfast memory of childhood geography, that CS Lewis used to artistically conjure The Narnia Chronicles, Morrison created an album that touches on holiness. Not holiness of any religious creed but an otherness of place and sensitivity of humanity. The holiness of its otherness. The holiness of its spiritual serenity.  

Back to Blake:

 

“See the Lord in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.”

JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT LIVE AT THE RYMAN

A couple of lines into Bradley Cooper singing Maybe It’s Time in the movie A Star Is Born and I was saying “Jason Isbell”. Now Isbell has been treading the boards for the guts of 20 years with first Drive-By Truckers and later his own The 400 Units. However, it was his “hello to sobriety” album Southeastern in 2013 that introduced him to the wider world. Five years and two more albums later and his work is so distinctive that Bradley Cooper can’t hide the Isbell signature sound. 

Time to welcome a live record that can collect Isbell’s best songs from those three records and give them extra bluster with The 400 Units let loose. Of course that changes the songs on Southeastern and Something More Than Free as they didn’t have The 400 Unit on their studio carnations. With Sadler Vaden and Isbell doing their guitar duelling and Mrs Isbell, Amanda Shires, giving some whirling dervish Steve Wickham-esque fiddle, this is a live show of energy and clout.

Recorded over six sold out nights at Nashville’s legendary Ryman Theatre this record doesn’t only highlight the power of the band but also the depth and poignancy of the songs. It is a quick reminder of why we love this guy. Cover Me Up, White Man’s World, Last Of My Kind and White Man’s World. Goodness me. 

In the intoxicating live bluster nothing is lost of Isbell’s nuance of heart and soul. 24 Frames’ spiritual cemtax still asks questions:

 

You thought God was an architect, now you know

He's something like a pipe bomb ready to blow

And everything you built that's all for show

Goes up in flames

In 24 frames

 

 

 

The most beautiful of love songs If We Were Vampires has you reaching for your beloved’s hand:

 

It's knowing that this can't go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone

Maybe we'll get 40 years together

But one day I'll be gone

One day you'll be gone

 

Live At The Ryman is a wonderful celebration of what Jason Isbell has achieved in these last five years. It’s a good assessment of where he’s at. It makes you grateful for the last three records and excites you about the next.

THE BEATLES (WHITE ALBUM) box set

So my Desert Island disc would always be The Beatles or as it is commonly known, The White Album. Oh, it is not my favourite Beatles’ record. That is Abbey Road. It is not the best Beatles’ record. That is Revolver. Yet, The White Album is the one I would want. 

Why? It is the eclectic mix of sounds. If you are on a desert island, on your lonesome, then you need to be able to rock out with songs like Back In The USSR or Helter Skelter. Turn it up loud. There will be other times to be reflective and Blackbird, Julia and Long Long Long can give that meditative introspection. Cry Baby Cry might come into its own and when my predicament causes me to lose sleep then perhaps Good Night will be the lullaby to do the trick. Yer Blues is for a heavily depressive afternoon and for celebration there is always Birthday. Revolution can give inspiration for change! Surely no other album ever made has this kind of sonic sprawl 

The White Album is also a perfect Desert Island Jukebox. This record has almost a history of Twentieth Century music. Honey Pie is all 1920’s music hall, the closing Good Night brings crooner Ringo into a big 50’s film soundtrack, there is a touch of Caribbean ska on Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, and country in Don’t Pass Me By. 

Children’s stories that filled Saturday mornings at the Picture Houses in Liverpool are here in Rocky Raccoon and The Continuing Story of Bungalow. 

Just back from time with the Maharishi in India, there are some folk hints in the acoustic finger picking style that seemed to have taken up some jamming time with Donovan in the ashram. 50’s rock n roll is in there with a pastiche of Chuck Berry’s Back in the USA on Back in the USSR. Beach Boy harmonies give that same song an early 60s feel too! So many genres.

Scanning the musical history that influenced them is one thing. The White Album goes further. It is not just the history of music until 1968, it takes us beyond 1968 to the future of music too. 

The embryonic stages of the Beatles’ early solo records is on here. Julia is the very personal introspection that Lennon would follow up in Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. The sweeping sounds of George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a big hint at Harrison’s massive triple album All Things Must Pass. Good Night could be on Starr’s Sentimental Journey. the short experimental, and lucky to be on this great record track, Wild Honey and Can You Take Me Back not even credited are templates for some of the do-it-yourself miniatures on McCartney’s eponymous debut.

Then surely Revolution 9 that no one but Lennon thought should be here is the inspiration of samples and loops that will become central  in pop decades later and would heavy metal have got so bit with Led Zeppelin if Helter Skelter hadn’t taken Hendrix and Cream and gave it more bang!

50 years after this album there is a six CD deluxe edition that gives me even more reason to take it to my desert island. 

Giles Martin, son of original Beatles’ prouder George, has almost reinvented those scared sounds. I need to disagree with Paul Weller who has said he doesn’t need to hear this remix because the original was good enough for him. I would suggest that Martin takes one of the best albums ever made and somehow makes it even greater.  

Stereo was of no interest to The Beatles, a new fangled thing that George Martin did a lazy job of instrument separation in the speakers. Son Giles uses the fifty years of studio knowledge in-between to re-centre the sound. 

He did the same job on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, last year. These new mixes give Ringo’s drums a lot more bang and you can hear the ping in every acoustic guitar. There are sounds never before heard and everything is so bright and fresh. It is not going too far to say that you are hearing something new. The verve. The energy. The magic of The Beatles playing together. 

The extra CDs concentrate on that last line. Throughout 4 discs of demos and out-takes we get close to The Beatles than ever before. First the Esher sessions recorded in Harrison’s house at Kinfauns give us access to 27 songs that had mostly been written in India over the previous two months. It is fascinating and satisfying listen. Acoustic versions of Back In The USSR, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Yer Blues and a delicate Julia where the guitar playing goes askew but not the intent in Lennon’s soul

You got to ask too how Not Guilty and Junk didn’t make the record but you’re glad that John’s Child Of Nature waited to flower into Jealous Guy at a later stage.

The other discs throw up ten minutes plus versions of Helter Skelter and Revolution that reveal The Beatles loving a jam. There are embryonic versions of Let It Be, Hey Jude and Lady Madonna and rarities such as (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care and Blue Moon. The comedy of nonsense track Los Paranoias made my daughter question the money her dad handed over for this but I love this Beatlefest so much that I even love the instrumental out-take of Savoy Truffle!

The story has it that this was The Beatles starting to unravel. I do not doubt that the beginnings of the end are growing between these chords and melodies but I think the rumours that they were finished here are highly exaggerated. 

They have just come back from what was almost a sabbatical in India that lasted for almost two months. The communal aspect of that sojourn had not had time to fray just yet. This box proves that it was still fun to be a Beatle in the middle of 1968 and that they were cooking when they played together. You can see why McCartney tried to get them to go out live again. 

On these White Album extras, The Beatles are tight, the harmonies are sweet, the creativity as energy, angst, love and tenderness. It almost makes you want to get a few weeks on a desert island just to take it all in!

MUMFORD & SONS - DELTA

Delta is Mumford & Sons growing up record. Now of course, they have been big boys since Sigh No More dropped, to a success they never dreamed of, a decade ago. For years following that success, they lived in the bubble of the road but for the last three years admit to re-entering the real world for the first time in their working lives. 

Delta is a collection of songs by a few men who have come off the stage to find themselves living in a fallen world. Their new environment is best described in Darkness Visible, their reading of part of Milton’s Paradise Lost though the reading is actually done by Gill Landry of Old Crow Medicine Show.

How good Delta is depends. It depends if you are wanting the kind of sales that the band enjoyed with Sign No More and Babel? It depends on whether you are wanting to jig around to every song. At their Belfast gig Marcus Mumford, himself, said, “Thank you for being patient with the new songs. I know some of you just want us to play Little Lion Man 15 times”.

On the sales it is good that this band are on Island Records the label of all labels who have patience with their artists. Massive sales has never got in the way of development of art at Island. If you are wanting more and more Little Lion Men then you will be disappointed and can I ask you to not be lazy; listen to more than Guiding Light!

Guiding Light was a clever lead off single for all of the above parties. The Little Lion Man fans think the banjo is back. Let’s get a load of that and Island Records can smack a sticker on front saying “Includes Guiding Light” to draw in the Little Lion Man fan club!

Guiding Light is a powerful song, probably the antidote to Darkness Visible but this is no revival of the old sound. The old instrument is back but what they have done with it is worth a good music review in itself. Throughout the record it is used in creative ways never before conjured, the riff on Beloved, jangling in and out of Rose Of Sharon, a strong deliberate guide across Delta as the whole thing heads towards the open sea!

Producer Paul Epworth has broadened the Mumford palette with ideas and little deft touches of beats and electronica. The Wild sounds like something Elbow might conjure with that orchestral build. Darkness Visible has a mid sixties psychedelic sound somewhere between In Search of the Lost Chord Moody Blues and White album Beatles. 

October Skies with delicate autumnal piano and gentle harmonies is gorgeous and Psalmlike spiritual. Surely stadiums across the world will soon be filled with the stunning pop singalong of Forever. These last two songs are as fine a work of songwriting craft that these guys they have produced to date. 

Marcus Mumford’s voice has matured too. It laments and soars. It groand one moment and is finds slants of hope the next. His working with T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Jim James, Rhiannon Giddens and Taylor Goldsmith on lost Bob Dylan lyrics has not done his creative processes any harm!

I am always intrigued by the theology of Mumford & Sons. When I spoke about the band in American Colleges five years ago I concentrated on the darkness and light of the first two records. That battle still rages on Delta. Those are still the key words. There’s a lot of fear in these songs but a lot of shelter and refuge too.

Little spiritual gems sometimes take years to drop out of a Mumford & Sons' song into my soul but as they have called it an album about “death, divorce, drugs and depression”, to which I might add doubt, then there is a voice in the song Beloved which I might surmise is Marcus’s Grandmother that maybe put this thesis in a couplet:

 

“She says the Lord has a plan

But admits it's pretty hard to understand”

 

While we unravel that one, a fascinating, mature and eclectic album by Mumford & Sons will be a very welcome companion indeed. Like faith it is a slow burn into something more fulfilling.