SOUL SURMISE

ELBOW - GIANTS OF ALL SIZES

Elbow fascinate me. I would not call them a favourite band but I have so much appreciation. Their last record Little Fictions didn’t cross my radar but I have loved Seldom Seen Kid and The Take Off And Landing Of Everything. This one is up with those.

There is a near eccentricity about Elbow’s beautiful layering of instrumentation and then of course Guy Garvey’s lyrics are on the poetic end rock lyrics. Garvey’s love of Joni Mitchell explains his rather unorthodox lyrical shape but it plays havoc with melodies. That might just mean that Elbow records need more listens, a little harder work. 

Garvey’s subject matter, introspective honesty and social and political astuteness is what makes Elbow a vital, almost urgent, listen.

This is where Giants Of All Sizes is exceptional. His father’s death and the birth of his son is the personal arc of the story. Garvey has said "Jack's arrival really helped me through Dad's death, because it made Dad's death part of things, rather than the end of things. And it made my own life part of things, rather than the point of things.” We all need such perspective.

World issues get a wrestling with too. Empires, my favourite, reminds those of us stressed about Brexit that every day across our globe is an end of the world for some. It is sensitivity sobering and a agin a perspective shifter. 

White Noise, White Heat moves close to protest music. This is all about Grenfell Tower and the injustice that the poorer communities in our societies suffer. Garvey sees himself as “some Blarney Mantovani with a lullaby when the sky is falling in”. 

The opening line of the entire record is “And I don't know Jesus anymore”. I am not sure that it is a statement of lack of faith in Jesus as much as a line that speaks into a culture of deep dark uncertainty. Elbow throw us into a vortex of grief, personal and societal. They also bring us back to lover and child as the place to find stability and hope through the tossing about. 

It makes for an album that allows Elbow’s dramatic near prog sound to ebb and flow. Garvey holds it all in with his honest poetry.

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS - GHOSTEEN

Ghosteen is well named. It is a haunting and hypnotic record, written and performed by a man walking through the valley of the show of death. The tragic death of Nick Cave’s son is well documented. That Cave’s last album Skeleton Tree was a response to it is slightly misleading as many of the songs on that record were written before Arthur’s death even apparently the opening lines You fell from the sky/Crash landed in a field.”  

Ghosteen though, even seen as it should be a musical trilogy that began with 2013’s Push The Sky Away, is certainly steeped in a poet father using words to make sense and mourn. Musically it has the same sparse musical accompaniment as the first two in my suggested trilogy, indeed a blend and blur of the two. 

The near flocculent synth sounds give a layer of eery feel that Cave sets upon perhaps the greatest poetic achievement of his career. Ghosteen is when Cave finally and without any more debate takes the Leonard Cohen mantle as poet laureate of rock music. Cohen’s influence is everywhere, particularly on the lead off song Spinning Song when it moves from a near spoken word to melody and almost hymnal vocal.

That word hymnal makes sense. Like Cohen, Cave’s work is haunted with Jesus and God. Unlike Cohen, Cave is not so convinced about the transcendent side of that. He puts that well in Bright Horses:

 

And everyone has a heart and it's calling for something

And we're all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are

And horses are just horses and their manes aren't full of fire

The fields are just fields and there ain't no Lord

 

Cave speaks for a large percentage of his generation, at least in the western world, who struggle with that transcendent side of life, and resultant faith. In Waiting For You he sings:

 

“A priest runs through the chapel, all the calendars are turning

A Jesus freak on the street says, "He is returning"

Well, sometimes a little bit of faith can go a long, long way”

 

If for the Jewish Cohen Jesus seems to have been a strange companion then the same could be said of the athletic or agnostic Cave. The image of Jesus in his mother’s arms appears not only in Night Raid but in Fireflies too. Then in Sun Forest we move from Jesus at Christmas to his Easter Passion:

 

“And it isn't any fun, no, it isn't any fun

To be standing here alone with nowhere to be

With a man mad with grief and on each side a thief

And everybody hanging from a tree, from a tree

And everybody hanging from a tree”

 

As a pastor I often call the death of a loved one a sacred space whether you are of a spiritual faith or not. Grief is a space for reflection and questions and a reconsidering of everything that once seemed sorted. Questions of God are understandable if not obligatory even for those who answer no.

Ghosteen is like a soundtrack for that scared space. Literary, imaginative and constantly returning to a cold often faithless realism it brings us to sharp vivid perspective on what is important. 

Love of wife and the lost son he grieves are central to Cave’s thesis. Perhaps the most stand out lyric of all comes in the title track. In the ordinariness of washing clothes comes the deep currents of love rip. 

 

“I'm speaking about love now

And how the lights of love go down

You're in the back room washing his clothes

Love's like that, you know, it's like a tidal flow

And the past with its fierce undertow won't ever let us go

Won't ever let you go”

 

Indeed!

THE ORPHAN BRIGADE - TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

Very occasionally, I end up with a sermon that I think is so prophetically edged, that I cannot wait to preach it BUT I am terrified that I won’t be able to do it justice. To The Edge of The World is an album that I am terrified to review because I worry that I might not quite nail it, explain it, express my love for it. 

Late last year I had the privilege of a cup of coffee with Ben Glover in my office. He’s a songwriter I admire and I loved his last solo record Shorebound very much.

In the course of the conversation he told me that his collaborative with Neilson Hubbard and Joshua Britt, The Orphan Brigade, were going to write an album about the East Coast of Antrim. My head blew off and we talked about The Children of Lir, Ballycastle’s Black Nun and how he hoped he might get John Prine to sing on a song about Slemish.

To say I was excited was an understatement. Our house is in Ballycastle and we spend a lot of time down that East Coast. I spent my youth gazing out at Slemish and climbing it many Easter Sunday mornings. Imagine an album of songs about my places. Like Springsteen’s New Jersey. My stories almost canonised in song.

I became aware early this year that The Orphan Brigade were indeed in Northern Ireland and I surmised how it might be going. Then in August Ben honoured me by sending me those songs. 

I walked over to the Bonamargy Friary in Ballycastle and listened to Black Nun at Julia McQuillan’s grave where they had actually written the song. The next day I headed down to Kinbane Head where they wrote the title song. Then I walked along Ballycastle beach looking out at the cold seas of Moyle listening to Children Of Lir. I had never experienced an album in this way before or with more pride and joy as I listened in the places that what I was hearing were created.

Writing in the outdoors was a unique The Orphan Brigade way to go about their art. Their debut was done in a haunted house in Kentucky, their sophomore in caves in Italy. The Antrim coastline seems like a breeze in comparison. The Northern Irish breeze can be felt in the sound, right the way through.

It is amazing how many young fair maidens have reportedly died in tragic circumstances in the 30 or so miles from Glenarm, home village of the aforementioned Ben Glover, to Ballycastle. These songs cover four such tales and add a Spanish nobleman from the Spanish Armada who drowned and was buried under a chestnut tree near Cairncastle. Add to that a prophetic nun and St. Patrick himself and we have the makings of a drama more fascinating than Game Of Thrones, also associated with the scenes of this album.

The sound is wonderful. There’s an American folk blues foundation throughout but the mandolins, flutes, fiddles and pipes impregnates everything with the Irish location. I was gazing across to Fair Head from Kinbane Head, Rathlin to my left, and Scotland ahead. There was a wind upon on the water and when Barry Kerr’s uilleann pipes came in it was spine tingling - the sound perfect for the view. The campfire sound of Children Of Lir was perfect for a beach walk listen. You can feel the boat rocking from side to side in Glenarm Bay for Captain’s Song (Sorley Boy). In the latter John Prine comes in and it is utterly wondrous to imagine that voice singing about our Sorley Boy, on our seas! 

I could go on… let me. St Patrick On Slemish Mountain is pure Gospel in a sound that would be likely to appear if Woody Guthrie came across Mumford & Sons; The Lumineers could cover Fair Head’s Daughter; Under The Chestnut Tree has the sweetest melancholy in a beguiling Celtic swing; Mind The Road like a closing prayer takes us into Ireland’s terrible beauty of glens and coastline along side "the lingering shadow of a gunman". 

When Ben left my office after that coffee I was excited. I had anticipation at what this, yet to be written, record might be but I was also apprehensive. What if it was no good! I should have had more faith. This is, I believe, The Orphan Brigade at the peak of their powers, all three individually and the three as collective. It is the spirit and breeze of my favourite coastline in the world made song. Thank you guys! 

AMANDA ST. JOHN - MUSCLE SHOALS SESSIONS

I have so wanted to hear this record since I stopped for a brief chat with Amanda St. John coming off Ballycastle beach and she told me that she was going to record in Muscle Shoals. How exciting is that I thought, as I hurried to catch up with the family.

I have had to wait for a while but here it is. It does not disappoint. 

Amanda St John has a voice. It is a big one. It has that traditional gritty soul sound of Janis Joplin and yet has that contemporary pop sound of Emeli Sande. She could be Co Antrim’s Mary Coughlin but Amanda's voice is clearer, purer and wider in range.

With a voice as big as this, it is about discipline and control, instead of every song being overwhelming. She does this wonderfully. One of the albums strengths is its variety. 

There is the tenderness of Walk Away; the acoustic singer songwriter feel of Take A Leap written with Gareth Dunlop; the rocking Don’t Think That You Know; the brooding Bring Me; the piano led Truth; the more contemporary, almost Christine and The Queens, beats of Made Myself Known.

St. John is an honest writer. These are songs full of soul. To the very depths of it. These are resilient songs from a women overcoming her fears and finding faith in herself, in her art and that amazing voice. 

It might seem a long way from Glenariff, County Antrim to Muscle Shoals, Alabama but Amanda St. John’s voice wasn’t just up to inhabit the legendary studio - it graced it. She went. She conquered. She brought it home!

MARC COHN & BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA - WORK TO DO

As I listened to Marc Cohn’s Walking On Memphis all wrapped up in the soul voices of Blind Boys Of Alabama I immediately thought how obvious this collaboration was. 

In that, his biggest hit, Cohn’s touching down in the land of the data blues… walking with his feet “ten feet off Beale”… and then -

 

They've got catfish on the table

They've got gospel in the air

And Reverend Green be glad to see you

When you haven't got a prayer

But, boy, you've got a prayer in Memphis

 

Oh how Blind Boys pump soul right through the heart of it.

Even more extraordinary vocally is another song from Cohn’s debut record. Silver Thunderbird turns into a 10 minute work out. It is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird with voices, instead of guitars. Breathtakingly uplifting. 

Talk Back Mic and Work To Do on the other hand send Blind Boys off towards a Marc Cohn sound. The former has a tasty John Leventhal guitar solo and the latter has that Cohn piano signature and is maybe the most beautiful track on the record.

It’s not only Cohn’s lyrics that make this collaboration inevitable. That husky Cohn voice is a perfect fit for these guys. A stripped back Ghost Train, yet again from Cohn’s eponymous debut  is another gem. When Blind Boys come in, it is soul tingling. Baby King might be the most even sharing of vocals. 

Blind Boys bring their own best off to play in the opening Walking To Jerusalem and their exquisite version of Amazing Grace to the tune of House Of The Rising Sun

This is an album that re-introduces Marc Cohn whose career seems to have been simmering under in recent years and gives Blind Boys Of Alabama another career high on their 80th year!! A match made in heaven, this might be one of the best album either of these artists have ever released!

SNOW PATROL - REWORKED EP2

With a band reworking old songs like Snow Patrol are doing in this Reworked project, it would be very easy to just talk about the difference in the arrangements of the songs.  So, let me stop right here and write about Reworked EP2 as a record in itself.

This is a beautiful piece of Snow Patrol. There is a tenderness to the arrangements and production that gives us, among the goodness, Snow Patrol’s sweetest song yet in Heal Me. It flutters and floats across your soul with the kindness and gentleness of its lyrics.

I cannot help but hear the rest of the collection as being about Belfast.

I Think Of Home is Gary Lightbody’s version of John Lennon’s In My Life but more personally revealing as we ride with him on a train from Bangor to Belfast, visit his Granny in Derry’s Fountain Street and travel with him as a child across Ireland with his family and two dogs. Utterly beautiful!

Written as part of the Seamus Heaney project On Home Ground, I love its take on Irish history:

 

“The punch out teeth of Irish history

Mistakes were made let’s leave it there

There’s one thing we can all agree on

There’s beauty north, south, east and west”

(you gotta love those 4 Corners… I feel a festival coming on!!)

 

In the context of this EP it is hard to not see Called Out Of The Dark as song about Belfast too. The “rain washed histories” that is best described in those opening words:

The closing Take Back The City has this same healing sound. It’s like reflective compassionate lament for a city that Lightbody didn’t always love but has come home to make a weighty contribution to its flourishing.

It is all there in the lyric. Though Take Back The City laments the negative side of Northern Ireland’s conflict, it is a love song to the city, enjoying Belfast and creatively reshaping it. Lightbody sings about the broken record of entrenched political sectarianism and about the futility of picking sides in a historical fight he doesn’t understand. 

The main thrust of Lightbody’s ode to home though is about sucking the marrow out of the city, sometimes admitting to partying too much. Where I have personally been inspired is in the verse:

 

“God knows you put your life into its hands 

And it's both cradled you and crushed 

But now it's time to make your own demands.”

 

I cannot wait for the full-length album of these reworked Snow Patrol songs but this EP2 as an entity in itself is a potent meditative work of healing and hope. In its gentleness it is one of the strongest ever Snow Patrol releases.

M. CAMBRIDGE - SEA SONGS: ANATOMY OF A DROWNING MAN

You would never put the East Antrim Coast as a runner to be the next musical hotspot to compare with early 60s Liverpool, late 60’s California, late 70s London and New York or all-the-time Nashville but 2019 sees not one… not two… but three astonishing pieces of work, rooted in the land between Glenarm and Ballycastle and their off shore seas! 

Runabay’s album of haunting beauty has already been reviewed on Soul Surmise and very soon I will be raving about The Orphan Brigade’s To The Edge Of the World. In between, Paul Bowman my colleague in Fitzroy, tips me off about M Cambridge’s fascinating Sea Songs: Anatomy Of A Drowning Man, trawling the same seas and mythical stories as The Orphan Brigade.

Mark McCambridge is the most significant songwriter to hail from my hometown of Ballymena (apologies Adrain Thompson and Del Currie) since The 60s produced David McWilliams who had his name on the side of London buses - America has Dylan, England has Donovan and Ireland has McWilliams!

His band Arborist gained critical acclaim for their debut record Home Buriel (“A staggering debut of death and substance” - Mojo) and before they unveil what’s next McCambridge under the moniker M Cambridge has hidden himself away in the Curfew Tower in Cushendall as rock stars do, and created this endearing unique little concept record. 

A studio in Cushendall I hear you gasp! Well, refill your longs for a bigger gasp as I tell you that it owned by Bill Drummond the Scottish, but born in Transkei a son of a Church Of Scotland minister, main man in 90s band KLF among his many other musical and artistic projects. Who knew? I do now.

A recording studio in an iconic historical old tower quite close to the sea is a perfect space for McCambridge to tease out his work. Mark traveled across the islands of Britain and Ireland in his research. Stan Hugill’s Shanties From The Seven Seas (Martime) seems the most influential text book. The documentary of loofa this is available HERE 

In the end Sea Songs gives a wee history of the sea shanty - work songs that give a workers social  history and shouldn’t be sung on land - and wider Ulster too - The Weaver poets and The Glens Of Antrim’s Francis Turnley.

McCambridge comes across as a musicology archivist, a soundscape imaginative, a crafted poet and a fine songwriter. Sea Songs is an eclectic mix of songs and spoken word.

My Sailor Boy, Serafina, A Sailor’s Lament and the haunting Of Water are crafted songs; gentle and haunting In between there is the hilarious story of sea shanty collector Jim Corr, from the west of Ireland, being asked to go and rig, a man he’s never heard of, Neil Young’s (yes, that Neil Young) schooner. Mark’s poem about Francis Turnley, who financed the Curfew Tower in the19th century, could sit with any Weaver poem.

All this makes McCambridge some kind of renaissance man; a musicology archivist, a soundscape imaginative, a crafted poet and a fine songwriter. Sea Songs is an eclectic mix of songs and spoken word and fits together perfectly. That my hometown and county should be producing this kind of art is unprecedented. Like the Glens, location of their creation, we are on a roll.

YESTERDAY - THE FILM REVIEWED

I loved it, loved it, loved it!

You can tell a very good movie when no one rises to leave as soon as the credits start. When you then see the staff coming in to clean, dancing in the aisle…

I am a Beatles’ fanatic but not all films anchored in a Beatles’ soundtrack have worked. The late 70s Bee Gees dominated Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was quickly forgotten! Much as I wanted to love 2007’s Across The Universe, a few great covers on the soundtrack were all I have revisited.

Yesterday is so different.

Now, let me say at the outset. This is a Romantic Comedy in the same lineage as Notting Hill and Love Actually! It is the classic tale of the romantic battle between love and fame and it ends in Hollywood’s obligatory way. It is a feel good movie and boy it makes you feel good.

For me, however, the success of Yesterday is The Beatles. A world that has forgotten The Beatles. Oh my. The only good thing would have been no Oasis! After that, it is a cultural travesty. 

When Jack Malik, played by Himesh Patel, discovers that a 12 second black out across the world has erased the memory of The Beatles (and one or two other things that become known as we go) he has two things going down. 

The first is that he has the most brilliant catalogue of songs at his disposal in his attempts to become a successful songwriter. He can even pull George Harrison's Something, Here Comes The Sun and While My Guitar Gently Weeps in among the Lennon-McCartney ones!

Secondly, he is almost like the chosen one who has the onerous task of preserving that catalogue. He needs a trip to Liverpool to search the back of his memory to keep songs like Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane alive. 

As if The Beatles are not enough of a core to the love story, Ed Sheeran is added to the piece. Playing the boy next door Suffolk pop star to Malik’s Suffolk boy next door, Sheeran nurtures Malik’s talent and eventually gives way that Malik’s songs are better than his. He has no jealousy. He plays himself well!

As a Beatles’ fan since I was fifteen years old, I absolutely basked in the joy of their songs and their story. These songs are an amazing avenue to feeing good. Well spotted Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle. It is the way that they give Yesterday its originality and utter charm. 

I would love to wax more lyrical but there are so many little twists and turns and laugh out loud jokes that I am giving no spoilers. If you want to have a great night out and party with the cinema staff then Yesterday is the movie for you.

As it ends, and you sit in the theatre listening to the greatest band that ever wrote songs, a good question to ask would be about vocation. Does art need sales and fame and wealth or can it be used in more everyday ways? Can we cast aside that chalice of the temptation of being more than we should be so that we can be all that we are?

Evil's face might not be subtle but watch it close. This is a story of the spiritual learning of the right choices. Love always and truth as often as possible is its best slice of wisdom.

Yesterday might be a rom com but don't miss these spiritual questions. An even more angsty performance of Help! is particularly well placed in the story

KARINE POLWART - SCOTTISH SONGBOOK

Karine Polwart is an artist as an artist should be; the way I like them to be. She is thoughtful, spiritual, politically astute and has great social critique. She loves language and of course the melodies and musical arrangements that she sets her words in.

If you were lazy, you might miss this as a stop gap album between her heavily lauded Laws Of Motion (Soul Surmise Album of 2018 for goodness sake!) and whatever she writes next. This is no kind of stop gap. This is a project of breadth and depth. It is weighty with social, spiritual and emotional reflection.

Equally a lazy approach and you’ll miss a significant chunk of this work. Don’t stream it or pay for the download. Don’t even buy the ordinary hard copy edition. Art is much more precious than a throw away mp3 and songs are art. Especially this collection.

Buy the deluxe edition, hard book and all. It is the only one that should exist! The book is as much a part of this project as the songs. Inside the striking artwork of Jen Frankwell, Polwart shares essays of life growing up as a teenager in Scotland when the majority of these songs were written and that deeply emotional piece that she wrote when she heard that Scott Hutchinson of Frighted Rabbit had passed away.

Scottish Songbook is personally perfect. I have a similar love for this period of Scottish music. The last two years of the 80s and most of what I bought was outta Glasgow or not far away. That image of the SA 90 cassette tape on the cover. I had most of these bands in some mixed tape or other! Deacon Blue, The Blue Nile and The Waterboys make it on here but there were also Aztec Camera, The Big Dish, Love and Money, The Bathers, Danny Wilson and more. 

Before that there was Big Country all swirling guitars sounding like bagpipes and the post folk songwriting talents of John Martyn and Gerry Rafferty.

After them came Biffy Clyro, Chvrches and most poignant of all, to this collection, Frightened Rabbit who lost their main man Scott Hutchison to suicide last year.

When this idea started Polwart put together an evening of live songs. Some of those didn’t make the cut, that late 80s phase is only sparsely represented. Yet, the 11 songs left have given us an album that catalogues Scotland’s recent social history and songs of resilience against the odds.

Songs get reinvented. Big Country’s Chance finds a place to showcase its depth and the songwriting credibility of Stuart Adamson’s work, often ignored:

 

“He came like a hero from the factory floor

With the sun and moon as gifts

But the only son you ever saw

Were the two he left you with” 

 

Polwart eeks the spirituality out of John Martyn’s Don’t Want To Know:

 

“I don't want to know 'bout evil, I only want to know about love”

 

There is catharsis at work in Frightened Rabbit’s Swim Until You Can’t See Land with its forbidding prophecy of Scott Hutchinson’s tragic demise:

 

“Up to my knees now, do I wade? Do I dive?

This sea has seen my like before though it's my first and perhaps last time.

Let's call me a baptist, call this the drowning of the past.

She's there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back.”

 

Whether it is the young girl with the two children, the songwriter with mental health issues or the elderly couple in Strawberry Switchblade’s Since Yesterday, everybody here is looking for Dignity.

Which is of course that Deacon Blue classic. Again like Stuart Adamson, Ricky Ross is a little two quickly dismissed by the prejudiced musical snobs. Dignity has everything, literally  “home, work faith”. It’s about hope against hope. It is about a council worker and a yacht but more important about a place we all need, when it is cold of heart and soul and even body, for some dignity.

Over these 11 Scottish songs, Polwart whose folk roots is all about taking much older songs and reinventing them, uses the same discipline for these younger songs. With glocks, marimbas, omnichords and Indian harmoniums, among more traditional instruments, she takes the songs of her youth apart and rebuilds them, beautifully and with reverence. 

A triumphant artistic success. Take this work in. It will touch you deep within.

STOCKI'S FAVOURITE RECORDS OF 2019... SO FAR

Here are my favourite ten records of 2019 so far... 

 

10. JOSH RITTER - FEVER BREAKS 

read my review here

 

9. FOY VANCE - FROM MUSCLE SHOALS

review to come

 

8. MARTYN JOSEPH - HERE COME THE YOUNG

read my review here

 

7. ANTHONY TONER - OUR LADY OF THE WIND AND RAIN

read my review here

 

6. PATTY GRIFFIN - PATTY GRIFFIN

review to come

 

5. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - WESTERN STARS

read my review here

 

4. RUNABAY - BETWEEN THE LINES

read my review here

 

3. THE HEAD AND THE HEART - LIVING MIRAGE

read my review here

 

2. LUKE SITAL-SINGH - A GOLDEN STATE

read my review here

 

1. OVER THE RHINE - LOVE AND REVELATION

read my review here