Favourite Album of 2012

Nominations

Vice of the People
Albion Band

"It's had a new handle, and perhaps a new head, but it's still the old original axe." I don't know if anyone really thought that the name, access to the back catalogue and the presence Blair Dunlop ("I grew up in quite a folkie atmosphere") made these six young people the continuation of the legendary Albion band by other means. I heard them with a tiny audience in a tiny Bristol pub, and very good they were too, but possibly not being treated as Folk Royalty by the good people of Bristol. However, when they have produced material of this originality and quality — with an authentic folk-rock sound that's both slightly old fashioned and very contemporary -- their relationship to the original band is really neither here nor there. There are at least three stand out original tracks. Thieves Songs is a bitter political nursery rhyme; driven by lyrics and a beat. Wake a Little Wiser is explicitly a modern spin on Ragged Heroes (with maybe a structure that wandered in from the Black Joke?), which has the sense not to outstay its welcome. The remarkable How Many Miles To Babylon is another riff on a nursery rhyme, which turns out to be a ghost story -- why has no-one else tried to do a "night visiting" about a modern war? Blair Dunlop's voice is fresh and modern; Gavin Davenport is richer and older and folkier. On stage, the highlights are the rocked up morris instrumentals; on the CD, maybe the best thing is the fine traditional Adieu to Old England Adieu. But the album stands very successfully on its own two feet as a not-at-all-laboured conceptual argument about fame and wealth and what's going on in the land of Albion right now.

Skulk
Jim Moray

Is "enigmatic" the right word for this album? I didn't write about it when it first came out because, although I liked it I didn't think I'd understood it. As I've listened to it more I've enjoyed it more and more. And possibly understood it less and less.

Lazy critics always use expressions like "bad boy of folk" to describe Jim Moray, which might have been true if he hadn't done anything since 2004, but he has and it isn't. (The Independent talks about his "bleeps and beats" approach to folk, which is plain patronizing.) I do have a sense that since Low Culture (2009) he's done the pyrotechnics and mash-ups just about as well as that kind of thing can be done, and is now moving into a middle-period where he wants to be taken more seriously as a folk singer.

Skulk's actually not that traditional an album. "Hind Ettin" is one of those Tam Lin type stories about a lady who wanders off into a fairy wood and find that time has gone all wibbly; it starts off in full-on traddy mode -- voice, guitar, bit of fiddle, lady named Margaret who spends her time sewing silken seams -- but before long there are drums, reverbs, instrumental breaks, a total folk rock re-envisaging of the song. Very fine it is too. I sometimes say of performers like Martin Carthy and Jon Boden that they are primarily story tellers; Jim is primarily a music-maker. I found some of the ballads quite demanding: on a first listen I kept losing track of what the lady was doing in the woods or who and given which golden glove to whom. On the other hand there is magical sparkle to his singing -- there is a moment where he tells us that the lady's fairy son starts to play a magic flute and I can somehow hear centuries of fairy yarn spinners behind his voice. It segues directly into a piece of traditional banjo Americana which turns out to be a reworking of an electric piece by someone called Fleetwood Mac, and I would so have known that without being told. Hawkstone Grange is so traditional that it's almost parody; the Hog Eye Man, which is I think a sea shanty, is dressed up as rock and role. Some of the material wrong foots me:  a pro-Napoleon lament called "The Eighteenth of June" is almost a piece of conceptual art, all echoes and ambient noise. "Why is he singing this so incredibly slowly?" I asked, but a quick search revealed another version (by the frequently aforementioned Mr Carthy) is taken at roughly the same pace. It's the sort of tune you only notice three days after you listened to it. Haunting.
The best things on the albums are the ones most simply in his own voice; "Seven Long Years" puts his own tune to "Bay of Biscay" (another one of those night visiting songs about a sailor visiting his lover and then revealing that he's dead).

I think his previous albums sometimes felt schizophrenic, as if there was a famous old song over here  and a drum machine, and apple mac and an a hip-hop artist over here but that Skulk is trying to put the the two sides together. He clearly isn't one of those people who says "Oh, it's all just music": folk seems to be a sufficiently privileged, magical concept for it to be worth dusting down and reworking dusty old ballads into a new thing, but I'm not quite sure what that new thing is.

Dear Andrew

You are making things very complicated. Please delete above and replace with:

"This is a nice album, with good stories, pretty tunes, and clever arrangements. I liked it very much indeed."

Andrew

More Than Boys
Luke Jackson

A soldier travels home to break the news to the family of a friend that he's been killed; a man plays footie in the park with his son; a teenager remembers climbing trees when he was little; a young man remembers hanging out with his mates when he was a teenager, moans that his siblings are all having a better time than him; and sees himself for the first time from his parents point of view. A group of youths go fishing without a care in the world. Eleven perfect songs from an artist who is still a teenager himself. I don't know what the young people make of them but from my elderly perspective they seem to have distilled the very essence of a teenager's life.

And the winner is...

The Albion Band

Colston Hall
Vice of the People (CD)

We're left in no doubt as to what we've let ourselves in for. The band rush on to the stage, and without ado, akapella the opening track of their album: close harmony, through the nose, copper-family-ish; not specifically based on any song, but sounding like "arise ye men of England" or something of that kind, except that it's about the modern world and people who want their magical 15 minutes of fame. And then, still without ado, the electric guitars and the drums blare out, and we're straight into a heavy rock take on Mr Richard Thompson's Roll Over Vaughan Williams. This is most definitely going to be folk and it's most definitely going to be rock.

The programmes says New Albion Band but they definitely want to be thought of as simply the Albion Band with a new line up. Blair Dunlop, (guitars and vocals), is the son of Ashley Hutchings who founded the original band, but that's the only direct link, and Hutchings says that the new generation have largely gone it alone. Singer and squeezebox man Gavin Davenport actually seems to be the driving force, writing or arrange about half of the songs on the album, and acting as front-man in the live show. He has a deep, rich, northern voice where the younger Blair sings with a Moray-ish twinkle; they go excellently together. Katriona Gilmore contributes two songs, fiddle-playing and the only female voice.

The live show plays right through the album, but peppers it with number from the Albion Bands back catalogue. "You will be able to see that the guitar arrangement is based on the monster rock stylings of.... Martin Carthy" explains Gavin at one point; and yes, as a matter of fact, without being either parody or pastiche, you could see a lot of Carthy in Ben Trott (lead guitar's) performance of "I was a young man, I was a rover." (Carthy did indeed appear on one album in 1973. I recall that Phil Beer once remarked during a solo gig that, statistically speaking, two out of three members of the audience would one day be members of the Albion Band.)

We are told that Vice of the People is an album with a concept, although it isn't a concept album. The concept (and stop me if you've heard this before) is the vacuity of celebrity culture. If getting to know Simon Cowell is the only way you have of getting famous, then there really isn't much hope for you as a human being, says Gavin. "Almost as bad as inhering a folk rock band from your dad" interjects Blair. (The bands on-stage rapport is slightly self-conscious, but still convincing.)

You can see why folkies would make slebs their target: as Bernard Shaw might have said, martyrdom and reality TV shows are the only two ways in which people can become famous without ability. I suppose you could say that its a bit much for folkies to complain that the common people don't stand up and sing in pubs nowadays, and then complain when what's basically a glorified pub talent show becomes popular TV viewing. (Susan Boyle and the folklorization of the West End Musical, anyone?) But it presents a very good hook to hang an album on: not necessarily music of folk, but very definitely music about folk. The band is really, really, really good at voicing modern concerns in a folk idiom; and presenting it in a combination of traditional and rock arrangements. "Thieves Song" starts with the nursery rhyme "Hark, hark the dogs do bark" and turns it into a rant against dishonest politicians – we might as well be robbed by poor people as by MPs. Not a terribly new insight, as it happens, but the combination of vernacular and folkie dialect is spot on:

"And yet you scorn the beggar man who cries out for each crust
But on the pinstripe wolfshead you invest your faith and trust
And put the biggest rogues of all your parliament within
So don't despise the poor man though his clothes be awful thin"

Even cleverer is the following "How Many Miles To Babylon?" also based on a nursery rhyme. They are not the first people to whom the idea that ancient Babylon is in modern Iraq has occurred, but it's used here with considerable ingenuity. The person in the rhyme who is trying to get to Babylon and back by candlelight turns out to be a soldier from the gulf war:

"Come see there's little left of me
But longing for my love
And to see the child I never saw
I thank the stars above
Weary of the killing
Ravaged by the fight
I must go before the dawn
Snuffs the candle light"

He is in fact a ghost and the nursery rhyme has morphed into a hauntingly contemporary "night visiting" ballad.

Unusually, I thought the stand-out tracks in the live gig were the purely instrumental sets particularly the "Skirmish Set", a collection of infectious morris tunes in which the drums and amps are kept firmly in the background and the melodeon and fiddle take centre stage. (The melodeon player is Tim Yates from our own beloved Blackbeard's Tea Party. There is, when it comes down to, only one folk band in the world, but that folk band is very big.) The songs, I can't help thinking, came out better on the CD than live, because, as too often happens in folk rock sets, the very loud volume made the lyrics disappear so you couldn't quite follow what was being sung about: a great shame when the group so clearly has something to say.

The show winds up with Wake a Little Wiser, which you might see as a modern take on Ragged Heroes (with maybe a hint of the aforementioned Roy Bailey's Song of the Leaders.)

"From Wilberforce to Nightingale from Anderson to Paine
Our ragged heroes built this land come sing their praise again
And leave your tinpot idols out a rusting in the rain
And wake a little wiser in the morning."

This is great music; I haven't stopped playing the CD since the band wrote their names on it. Polished, intelligent, fun but above all, loud.