It’s 21 years since the last Wild Swans album, and 29 since their debut single, ‘Revolutionary spirit’.  How great then that this year they should make their best record so far into their on/off existence.  Released through the excellent Occultation label, the The coldest winter for a hundred years is a long way from that debut, though the vestiges of the young man who wrote it still course through Paul Simpson’s blood.  It would be harsh to say he overeggs the mourning for time past, because, well, it’s his lyrical patch as much as Liverpool is and he delivers beautifully nostalgic songs which are never entirely lost in dreams.  No longer needing or caring to situate themselves either as musically apart or in tune with musical fashions makes for songs whose chiming guitars – no less than 11 are amassed on ‘English electric lightning’ – have a timeless feel which suits the lyrical nostalgia perfectly and add bite to the plaints that things were both better and worse in Paul’s day.  It’s a heady, poetic, elegiac mix.  The accompanying EP Tracks in snow offers three additional songs which for one reason or another didn’t make the final cut; ‘Poison’ with its lovely heartbroken melody can consider itself particularly unlucky.   Both LP and EP are among my favourite records released this year.

And is it me, or is there a deliberate echo of George Martin’s speeded-up electric piano from ‘In my life’ threaded through ‘My town’? ‘Like music hall, variety, the Psychic Truth Society / Like Beatle wigs and Deaf School gigs / It’s over now, it’s over now’.

Talking of the Fabs, what’s the most fun I’ve had musically this year? Watching the Upbeat Beatles, that’s what.  Primal Scream pretending to be the Rolling Stones apart, I’ve never knowingly been to see a tribute band, but when allegedly the best Fab fabricators are playing for free on your doorstep, it would have been rude not to.  I wanted to go because I had always wondered what those songs would sound like live, and now I have some idea, because these pretend Beatles played both best and lesser known numbers just about perfectly.  Of course it was moptop wigs and Beatle suits to hide the ageing impersonators underneath.  John was a scream, and George might have made you cry with laughter or tears for the inadvertent mockery made of that beautiful man.  Paul was probably the best fit, while at least Ringo looked sufficiently like he was on loan from another group.  Of course the deep-seated connection between writing and delivery is broken by a tribute group, and it’s never going to have the same emotional heft as seeing the songs performed by their original writers (in a context magically devoid of screaming, death and ageing) but this was as close as anyone who couldn’t quite stomach an entire thumbs aloft Macca concert is ever going to get.  I left the village green with the undeniably uplifting and celebratory sound of everyone singing ‘Hey Jude’ ringing in my ears.

• Listen to ‘In secret’, ‘Chloroform’ and ‘Glow in the dark’ by the Wild Swans

Fair play to Robin though in acknowledging his debts and influences when compiling an Uncut cover mount CD earlier this year, for as well as picking the Clientele’s ‘Since K got over me’, he has led me to discover Nic Jones and specifically his Penguin eggs LP.  Is it overstating the case to imagine that Nic might have been one of those who kept English folk alive through the musical revolutions of the late seventies and early eighties?  His voice is sturdy if unspectacular, but his guitar-playing is rhythmically intricate and gave him the ability to freshen up any song that he might find up Cecil Sharp’s sleeve.  On Penguin eggs I particularly like the song Robin Pecknold chose, ‘Courting is a pleasure’, ‘Canadee-i-o’, which Bob Dylan subsequently performed in his own inimitable style on Good as I been to you, and ‘The humpback whale’, which marries idiomatic folk song to timelessly expressive acoustic guitar.

Thanks to his tendency to write songs featuring birds, I’ve finally got my head round Bill Callahan.  His voice is even sturdier than Nic Jones’, but it has in it qualities of the artist as opposed to the interpreter – experience, weariness and an almost newborn vulnerability all mixed up.  You could take Sometimes I wish we were an eagle and Apocalypse as a pair; and it’s tempting to think of the former as a break-up record and the latter – despite its title – as something of a return to life.  On ‘Riding for the feeling’ and ‘One fine morning’, Bill seems to be talking about his personal apocalypse in the past tense, viewed in retrospect; which perhaps makes the earlier album the epicentre of the destructive event.  That’s idle speculation though (a blogger’s stock in trade).  Bill’s themes are often simple – freedom, America, loss, settling down – but he tackles them with a complexity and an ambivalence which lets the listener see things afresh:

‘To belong to being derided for things I don’t believe in / And lauded for things I did not do / If this is what it means to be free / Then I’m free / And I belong to the free / And the free / They belong to me’ – ‘Free’s’

And the music, often sparse and understated, always suits the themes.  If I had to choose between the two, I’d go for Sometimes I wish we were an eagle, because it has so much in it, lyrically, musically, and that quality of his voice is at its best.

• Bill Callahan – Free’s
• Nic Jones – The humpback whale

So not having got my hands on the latest, much more expansive and expensive box set dedicated to Sandy Denny, I am listening to the five disc A boxful of treasures.  I’m also listening to Rufus Wainwright’s Want one.  Sandy is the better singer – at her peak, one of the very best ever – but Rufus has the voice he needs and writes a great song, so that I believe him just as I believe in the worlds that Sandy’s songs portray; the old folk song world of broken hearts and tragic tales, and the world of broken but resolute hearts of her own experience.  The introduction to a live version of ‘Who knows where the time goes?’ reveals that it was the second song she ever wrote.  She ran before she could walk.

Of course it’s yesterday’s news – hell, all of this post is – but Arcade Fire’s The suburbs grew and continues to grow on me with every listen.  That The neon bible was muddy, heavy, overblown, and drenched in the internal and semi-solipsistic consciousness of Win Butler made it doubly inaccessible but I’m glad I gave them one more chance.  While The suburbs doesn’t have quite the quotient of excitement that Funeral or The Arcade Fire did, it does have something, an air of mystery, an indefinable thread holding it together.  It’s nostalgic yet detached, subjective and universal.  But I’m afraid I still can’t help thinking of Alannah Currie from the Thompson Twins when I hear Régine Chassagne sing.

I like the Decemberists tipping their hat to the Smiths and trying to be R.E.M. more than I like them progging out and about (though since Shara Worden was singing with them, I could overlook that).  But while it’s affecting to hear Colin Meloy singing songs from his own heart, now I miss his yarn-spinning.  Is there no pleasing me?

I am underwhelmed by PJ Harvey’s Let England shake.  It’s the first of hers that I’ve bought, though I have always had a sneaking admiration for her.  I thought this might be the one, from the noise accompanying release, reading between the lines.  But her voice isn’t quite what I was hoping, and nor is the recording.  It sounds tinny where it should ring in peals like the bells in old flintstone churches.  Still, I’m glad she’s there, doing her thing.

I love Warpaint though, particularly when they get their shit together on songs like ‘Beetles’, and drift from groove to yearning melody.  It’s then that I think they belong in the lineage that includes the Slits, ESG and Luscious Jackson.  But if like those groups they can be idiosyncratic, lock down a groove, and find a beautiful melody, they can also be not only motorik, but plaintive and dreamy.  They repay a lot of listening.

• Sandy Denny – By the time it gets dark
• Sandy Denny – Boxful of treasure
• Warpaint – Beetles (Live session version)

The Clientele may be on hold, but together with Lupe Núñez-Fernández, Alasdair MacLean is back as one half of Amor de Días.  Any music that Alasdair makes other than as a strictly guest picker is of course going to be imbued with his sensibility, so there are many moments when Street of the love of days might be a Clientele album, but there are just as many when it could not, thanks to the blending of his songwriting with Lupe’s.  It’s generally lighter than the often sombre and haunted tones of the Clientele, and more consistently acoustic, but then perhaps it’s also poppier than the Clientele have been at any time since their early singles were collected together as Suburban light.  Vocal duties are alternated and you get the sense that the duo are having a conversation, a dialogue; not an inward-looking one, but one where both writers are looking out into the world from slightly different vantage points, a world of urban and pastoral light, deriving from both sources something of the same feeling.

Bracketed by the opening and closing ‘Foxes’ song’ , the track list reads like the contents of a volume of bucolic nineteenth century poetry, from ‘House of flint’ to ‘Wild winter trees’, taking in ‘Bunhill Fields’ and ‘Touchstone’.  But although the setting is quintessentially English, the music is flecked with Iberian and (less obviously) Brazilian influences; that track listing disguises a number of songs sung in Spanish.  You could triangulate three other duos to end up with Alasdair and Lupe – the Catalanonian blending of Guillermo Scott Herren  and Eva Puyuelo Muns as Savath and Savalas, whose Apropa’t in particular has the same feel of magic and light; John and Yoko, as late as Double fantasy; and, given the harmonies of ‘Dream (dead hands)’, the Everly Brothers.  But that probably demonstrates my listening more than theirs.

It’s as instrumentally rich as we have become accustomed to the Clientele being, with a variety of guests adding to the pot – Damon & Naomi, Louis Philippe, Gary Olson of Ladybug Transistor.  Produced by Ken Brake, it sounds gorgeous, quite apart from making any judgment of the songs themselves.

Stand-out moments are ‘House of flint’, a song which deserves to have been made to sound as lovely as it does.  ‘Harvest time’ is here in its original form, softer and dreamier and a little more nineteenth century than the sharply psychedelic version recorded for Bonfires on the heath. And just like the album as a whole, the title song winds its ivy melodies around you.

• Amor de Días

Twenty years ago I was in France, and so were the Field Mice.  During their September tour they (or rather two-fifths of them) stopped off to record a live acoustic ‘Black’ session for France Inter’s Bernard Lenoir, a.k.a. ‘the French John Peel’.

I was in the studio while the show was live on air, and during ‘Between hello and goodbye’, Bernard – mistaking me for someone who knew anything about sound engineering – passed me his headphones so I could hear what France was hearing over the airwaves.  Sounded pretty damn impressive to me, so I grinned inanely at him and put my thumbs up in the direction of the rest of the group.  But I also remember how dangerously, intoxicatingly fragile Bobby and Annemari’s performance was, as if it could fall apart at any moment, despite Bobby’s underlying assurance as both a guitarist and a prodigious songwriter.  And sadly fall apart is what the Field Mice did not long after the end of a tour that had been troubled by Annemari’s stage fright.

Of the other songs they played, there is a version of ‘Sundial’ which was otherwise only recorded for John Peel, ‘Willow’ from For keeps, and a lovely cover of Neil Young’s ‘Birds’ – a song made to measure for the Field Mice, really – which I’ve posted over at Nightingales, not being one to miss a trick.

And because 16th September was Monsieur Lenoir’s anniversaire, I also got to (help) sing ‘Happy birthday’ live on French national radio.  Fortunately audio evidence of this has disappeared.

Thanks must go to my friend whose finger was poised over the pause button that night – merci Jean-Philippe!

• The Field Mice – Between hello and goodbye (Bernard Lenoir) 
• The Field Mice – Birds (Bernard Lenoir) (via Nightingales) 
• The Field Mice – Sundial (Bernard Lenoir)  
• The Field Mice – Willow (Bernard Lenoir)
• You can pick up the Peel session at Victorian squid or Skatterbrain.

It took a little time for me to get my ears around it, but it was well worth the wait.  I doubt few if any sets of music in 2010 will have bettered This Is The Kit’s Wriggle out the restless for managing that rare trick of being both exact and loose at the same time.  It’s – dare I say it – perfect, but organic.  Immaculately produced by Jesse Vernon, it has the same space and natural richness as the records presided over by Joe Boyd, with nothing unnecessary added.  Kate Stables’ words too are precisely pruned, until all that remains is what needs to be there, so that these vignettes of nature, love and birth somehow manage to be both impressionistic and pin-sharp. 

None of which would be worth saying if between being exacting and limber, her music and melodies were not as fluid and beautiful as they are.  I’ve already raved about ‘Moon’ but every song here has either a lilt and a calming air, or a swell and a rush of wind to it.  ‘See here’ is of the latter kind, rising up on rough and sinewy guitar, and falling back to Kate’s default softness.  ‘Spinney’ also rises up, this time on a wider, orchestral bed of sound, and takes the same kind of undulating melodic path as ‘Moon’; neither outstay their welcome, both demand endless repeat plays.

It’s not really folk, though there are songs idiomatic of folk, and it’s not really pop, though there are pop songs.  And when ‘Earthquake’ rumbles in with its groove and riff, you might even call it rock.  Of course it’s not really rock either.  But everything is on a surer footing than Kate’s first LP, Krülle bol, which in the light of Wriggle out the restless plays like a development on the road to what’s coming next, thoughin itself it’s a sparse and melancholy joy.

The songs come so naturally from her lungs that it’s tempting to think they must have been written in five minute flashes.  But perhaps it’s craft that makes it look that way, given the time between the recording of this long player and the last.  Here’s hoping the next one comes that much quicker.

You get an excellent sense of that perfect fit between songwriter and song – and what a great performer Kate is – from the videos below of two songs shot in Paris by La Blogothèque.  She’s playing live in February; if you’re lucky, somewhere near you.

Photo by Oliver Peel

• This Is The Kit – See here (YouTube)
• This Is The Kit – Spinney  (La Blogothèque)
• This Is The Kit – Waterproof (mp3 via Dreamboat Records)

Phil Wilson owns it, and nails it.

• Phil Wilson – I own it

Info on the single and album here.

And he’s the reason that Backed with is back in action, with entry number 57 featuring none other than the June Brides.

Image courtesy of the sleeve’s designer.

From Unchained, the incomparable JC singing Josh Haden’s ‘Spiritual’, which originally appeared on The blue moods of Spain.

Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark.

• Johnny Cash – Spiritual
  

Not so much a new album as a collection of offcuts, but you won’t be surprised to learn that I think the Clientele’s offcuts are better than most groups’ best.  Minotaur gives you a quick romp through many previously encountered Clientele touchstones: symbolism; the Verlaines at one remove (it’s impossible to think that Alasdair didn’t have their ‘Death and the maiden’ in mind on writing his own far jauntier tribute to Paul Verlaine); the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band; instrumental Felt or Satie or Chopin or possibly all three; the supernatural and myth and legend.  It also shows that I was off target with my concluding assessment that Bonfires on the heath displayed signs of the Clientele running out of both ideas and steam, for all of these songs were recorded alongside those that made it onto the album, and were I suspect left off largely for thematic reasons rather than owing to any lack of quality.

Leading off is the title track, written from the perspective of the minotaur waiting in the labyrinth for Theseus to come, which is a lovely conceit, though of course if Alasdair really does feel like the minotaur, that’s maybe not so good.  But I guess we all do, at times.  Well, I do.  In contrast, the music is the Clientele at their crystalline best, acoustic picking and sighing violins as the clear water pattering and burbling over the bedrock of bass and drums underneath.

‘As the world rises and falls’ slurs and drones its sweetly weary way, five minutes of backwards West Coast freewheeling.  ‘No. 33’ shows a career in film music awaits Mark Keen after he boxes and shelves his Clientele drumsticks.  ‘The Green Man’ is follow-up or companion piece to ‘Losing Haringey’; Alasdair’s narration dwells impressively on dust, though not, I think, the same dust around which Philip Pullman built His dark materials.

And old-time live favourite ‘Jerry’ finally makes it to the status of official release.  An oddity in the Clientele repertoire, it’s been a problem song to record.  On early hearings it seemed impressively like a juggernaut colliding with a dainty sports car; when Alasdair felt he was up against it, he played ‘Jerry’’s guitar like he really wished it was an audience-killing machine-gun.  But it’s impossible to get quite that level of attack in a recording studio, quite the level of contrast that used to stun their audience.  They’ve done their best though.

So it’s a Clientele chocolate box assortment, and I’ll happily eat most, leaving a couple till last; ‘Strange town’ and ‘Nothing here is what it seems’ are the orange crème and Turkish Delight respectively.

• The Clientele – Jerry (via Stereogum)

I suspect the Amor de Días album, set for sometime release on Merge, will be something of a grower (there’s a tantalising short medley from it on the Amor website).  ‘New wine’ is the first chance to hear how the sound might vary from that of the Clientele, softer and subtler even than the Lupe-featuring ‘No dreams last night’ on God save.., if that’s possible.  It’s also notable for hymning a part of London that few if any have hitherto, namely Crystal Palace.

‘Old’ is the rueful, timeless number by the Claim, a reflection on ageing and death and carrying on which they might perhaps have written back in the day (‘Dear’ on the Black path retrospective suggests as much) but seems all the more poignant for the two Daves being – ahem – that much closer themselves to the subject they’re writing about (as of course we all are).  It puts me in mind of Colin Moulding’s song ‘Dying’ on Skylarking – ‘what sticks in my mind is the sweet jar on the sideboard, and your multi-coloured tea cosy’ – and of Ray Davies.  The Claim for me were always in that league, and they still are.  An atypical typical pop group.

Of the other contributors, Hacia Dos Veranos turn in a lovelier instrumental than one called ‘The cat and the cucumber’ has any right to be, while Allo Darlin’s ‘Tallulah’ is pretty too; no prizes for guessing whom they are referencing with the title.  Funnily enough you can imagine Robert Forster doing a nicely wry cover version.

Three cheers then to the Hangover Loungers for making it happen, and for what are high quality production values for a first venture as a record label.  There are two more EPs to come, and one of them features Rozi Plain, and no doubt many of the other acts who have graced the Sunday afternoon club with their acoustic presence, so readers would be well advised to collect the set.

• Listen and buy here

Saw three self-styled girls with guitars at the weekend, and each was great, and together – guitar, banjo, percussion, melody and harmony – they were stunning.    It was down to members of the audience to pick out of a hat (actually a tin) who would play in what order.  Each a woman with a guitar (or a shoulder-straining banjo), but each with a unique approach, and none with any honorable but musically off-putting air of having an axe to grind, of the kind that might once have been suggested by the collective tag.  For them at least the battle has long since been won.

Rachael Dadd was first out of the tin.  She has a voice with the timbre and purity of a bell, and you hear in it an emotional and somehow moral force.  A churchbell chime, but not constrained by that, instead running musically and poetically free.  You hear this on the follow-up to her piano-based Moth in the motor mini-album, the guitar-oriented Elephee EP, and well, long-term readers will know what a fan I am.

Kate Stables, the artist formally known as This Is The Kit, is Rachael’s partner in Whalebone Polly.  On top there are her wonderfully windblown melodies ululating in the air, while underneath her slightly fuzzy, muddy guitar mounts a gentle attack.  She plays her new single ‘Moon’, a perfect miniature, for which we the audience are invited to sound Kate’s opening note.  On vinyl it’s expanded into an equally flawless full-band version; its flip ‘Treehouse’ moves with similar grace but also a countryesque twang.  This Is The Kit’s album Wriggle out the restless is due for October release, and if it’s all as finely crafted as these songs, it will be great.

In a live setting Rozi Plain is perhaps a little more diffident, maybe less confident in her ability to stand toe to toe with her friends.  But she shouldn’t worry, because about half of what she does is jaw-dropping in its beautiful idiosyncracy.  It’s not that she’s other-worldly, as you might think from listening to her Fence album Inside over here; in fact she’s actually rather earthy.  The first song she plays has the sparseness of the Young Marble Giants, but after that, she draws them entirely from a world of her own.  They’re gentle and surprising and softly, almost unintentionally inventive.  She played lots of new songs and I hope they all see the light of day soon.

In the second half of the evening, each of the trio played a song to a theme, and happily for a man in possession of a birdsongs blog, the theme was geese.  You can catch Rachael’s and Kate’s geese over at Nightingales now; I don’t think Rozi’s committed hers to disc yet, so in its absence, I’ve settled on the lovely, spiralling ‘Roof rook crook crow’ from Inside over here.

• Rachael Dadd – Following the geese 
• This Is The Kit – Greasy goose 
• Rozi Plain – Roof rook crook crow

But for Chris’ tchotchke table over at La Terrasse, I might never have known that a solo work by Rachel Grimes had appeared.  Rachel was one of the core members of the Rachel’s collective, chief among them you would assume, for their possessive name to be hers.  Rachel’s were a glorious and thoroughly worked through coming together of chamber music and post-rock sensibilities, and as far as I can tell, still relatively unique in that respect.  Perhaps The sea and the bells and Selenography found them at their best but beautiful music is liberally bestowed across all five of their albums.  ‘Kentucky nocturne’ from Selenography is typical of what arose out of the writing partnership of Rachel’s three main players, Christian Frederickson, Jason Noble, and Rachel herself – swooping low and high, the formal melodies propelled by the looseness of the percussion.

Since the last Rachel’s record I’ve occasionally looked for news but found nothing, until Chris mentioned Book of leaves, and then only because it was obscured by sunlight in his tchotchke table photograph.  It’s 14 pieces for solo piano underlain by the occasional sample.  If you’re upwards of being a grade 8 pianist, you can buy it as sheet music.  And it picks up where the more Rachel Grimes oriented Rachel’s work left off – I’m thinking of the solo harpsichord ‘Honeysuckle suite’, again from Selenography – an assimilation of nineteenth and twentieth century piano music into a 21st century world view.  It’s austere but accessible, minimal but rich, reflective and dynamic.  The samples are predominantly of birdsong, giving me the excuse to post one of the pieces over at Nightingales as well as here.  The music goes where birds go, lives where birds are, in the trees and the air.  Have a listen and fly there too.

• Rachel Grimes – My dear companion
• Rachel Grimes – Every morning, birds
• Rachel’s – Kentucky nocturne 
• Rachel Grimes website
• Rachel’s website

Originally the plan was to present these alongside a Small Faces B side, but as you may have noticed Backed with is taking a little breather while I’m off with the birds.  So here without too much further ado are the three cuts from the soundtrack of the original stage version of Oliver! that feature one Stephen Marriott in the role of the Artful Dodger; as far as I can tell the first time that his voice was committed to vinyl.  Not only does Steve easily out-sing young Twist on ‘Consider yourself’, as he should, he also lays down a standard both for artfulness and ear-splitting volume that all subsequent Dodgers will have struggled – will struggle – to match.  With his East End background, his dad a pub pianist, the music hall awareness he will certainly have had, Marriott must have been Lionel Bart’s perfect Dodger for the musical version of Oliver Twist.

You can hear Bart’s tunes and the young Steven Marriott’s singing in the Small Faces of ‘Rene’, ‘Lazy Sunday’, and ‘Donkey rides, a penny a glass’.  And maybe I love them most for the soul-pop-psychedelia hybrid perfected on songs like ‘The Autumn stone’, ‘Afterglow (of your love)’ and ‘Song of a baker’ but it’s impossible not to retain great affection for those cockney knees-up numbers.

Alongside Marriott you will hear Ian Carmichael as Fagin, David Hovell as Oliver, and Joyce Blair as a particularly hard-bitten Nancy.

• Consider yourself 
• Be back soon 
• I’d do anything

Berlin Dancing is a little lost in the wilderness of MySpace, and I just wanted to throw Madeleine a note of encouragement, for what it may be worth.  She may decide not to go anywhere with it – there’s something in her voice that suggests as much – but I hope that she does.  If she can couple more songs like ‘Methods of anxiety’ and ‘Sleep it off’ to her beautiful voice, and let the world have them, well, that would make me and at least one other person happy.

Somehow Berlin Dancing put me in mind of old favourites Emily, and what I believe is a relatively recent song by Oliver Jackson, the group’s singer and songwriter.  The song I’m posting comes from a disc of outtakes and solo recordings, but otherwise it’s shrouded in mystery.  It has two distinct parts, and it repays a lot of listening.  I can’t even tell you what it’s called – let’s go for ‘The one with the whistled intro’.  The lyrics are slurred, indeterminate, as if either the feeling is more important than its exact expression, or the words were provisional, there being no driving imperative to finalise them.  I don’t even know when in the last five or ten years it was recorded, though I suspect it predates Bon Iver’s For Emma, forever ago, whose mood of redemption sought among the ruins of heartbreak the song shares.  Some other songs which I guess date from the same period are on show at the Emily MySpace, but this for me is the best.  On it Ollie travels a little of the way along the road that Tim Buckley took with Starsailor, but unlike Tim, who was at the time of that album’s recording sure of at least a few receptive ears, what comes out is aware only of itself, speaks only to itself, and in so doing Ollie achieves perhaps a purer blue, a purer black than Buckley ever did.

And that’s what connects an Emily song to Berlin Dancing, to someone just starting out, finding her voice and her feet, singing for herself rather than her supper.

(Thanks Richard)

• Berlin Dancing (MySpace)
• Oliver Jackson of Emily – The one with the whistled intro
• Emily – Stumble / Rachel / Boxing day blues over at Backed with
• Emily (MySpace)

In Merioneth, the wind lives and wails,
On from hill to lonely hill:
Down the loud, triumphant gales,
A spirit cries Be strong! and cries Be still!
– Lionel Pigot Johnson, ‘Dead’

Call it rather lent on permanent loan.  For Welcome, stranger, to this place the Wraiths have delivered – on top of This is Charing Cross – another albumsworth of predominantly nineteenth century poetry just about perfectly set to music of their own making.  Mog and Jon really do pull out all the stops to perform these poems, not simply via vocal delivery but through spot-on accompaniment and an all-round thoroughness of approach.  Sometimes managing to combine earthiness with a grim jauntiness – Beddoes’ ‘The drowned and the shipwrecked’ and Tennyson’s ‘Dark house’ – at other times making an unlikely pairing of ululation and the ethereal – ‘Merioneth’, ‘Above the dock’, Dickinson’s ‘Wild nights’ – the end results always engage with both poem and listener.

There’s nothing radically different about this second set, but nor did there need to be.  Keats’ ‘Casket of my soul’ is uniquely Gravenhurst-esque musically (you can imagine Nick Talbot getting his own morbid teeth stuck into this one), but otherwise they continue to elaborate musical settings which though grounded in guitar pop have something more – something other – about them.  A firmness of purpose, a dramatic and melodic kick, and an intuitive feel for the poems, nowhere better demonstrated than on another Tennyson, ‘Touch of a vanished hand’, which retains Mog’s first-time-of-asking improvisation over Jon’s foot-stomping music.  In so doing they reanimate Victorian poetic sensibilities – in these stanzas there’s a lot of death and loss, a lot of wind and water, but life too, in its extremities – and make you want to jump into the poetry both with and without their guiding musical hand.

Presumably the Wraiths are still majoring on nineteenth century poetry for rights reasons, but I start to wonder what they might do with late twentieth and twenty-first century poetry – perhaps even working with a living poet – and where that might take the music.  And I wonder whether they do requests.  There’s Rilke or Anna Akhmatova – admittedly with the additional complication of translation – or Sharon Olds and Paul Farley poems that I’m sure they’d do wonders with.

• The Wraiths 
• Cinematic projections