THE MEMORY BAND - Oh My Days

Four years after “Apron Springs“, it's a pleasure to find Stephen Cracknell's The Memory Band back in top form, indeed even more cohesive and assured in their stylistic crossover between traditional and contemporary folk, even though “Oh My Days” is an album that won't entirely win over the skeptical devotees of lo-fi folk.

There's no emulation or grandiosity in the English ensemble's music, the stroke of genius isn't really their forte, and the thirteen tracks form a sonic expanse of reflective tones that avoids weird murkiness, darting between stylistic disparities without any apparent incoherence, tying together various strands of English and American folk.

The folktronic suggestions of “Crow”, which open the album, recall the Penguin Café Orchestra and introduce the lyrical whirl of “A New Skin”, in which banjo and cajon tear through the joyous emotional trance, poised between blues and bluegrass.

Elsewhere a bold, driving instrumental emerges, “Blackberry Way”, with its powerful percussive structure disrupted by disorienting viola and violin chords that you'd expect on a John Cale or Michael Nyman album but certainly not in a folk project - one of the finest moments along with the superb “Ghosts”, where it's again the percussion that dilutes shimmering vocal harmonies, while a heavy harmonium underscores the lyrics' message of fear and hope.

Unlike the more ambitious folkers who in recent times have embraced, with more than a few doubts, the language of rock, Cracknell's group has no need to contaminate its stylistic universe: a command of songwriting and an anarchic verve allow the band to step down into the circle of pop music without ever seeming clumsy or out of tune.

These are simple pleasures, "Run River Run" and "Electric Light", which brush up against Crosby, Stills & Nash and Fairport Convention, without jolts but also without apathy, songs you're almost afraid to love, so predictable are they — but denying yourself simple pleasures is an even graver sin.

The female protagonist of "Oh My Days" is Hannah Caughlin, to whom Cracknell entrusts the emotions and stories of an adult world in "Some Things You Just Can't Hide", where abandonment and cynicism win out over the naivety and bewilderment that love brings, but it's longtime companion Nancy Wallace who dusts off the joyful notes of the ever-timeless "By The Time It Gets Dark".

Cracknell's sonic research often brings to mind this third album as an unreleased folk project by Penguin Café Orchestra produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto, not only for the suspended atmospheres of the closing "The Snake" but also for the tension underlying tracks like "Apples" and "Demon Days", the latter a splendid ballad steeped in blues and funk capable of brushing up against psychedelic, ethnic trance.

Ultimately, The Memory Band's music is a pastoral folk that welcomes pagan temptations, that is, illuminating contaminations ranging from electronica to blues, even reinterpreting Graham Bond in the manner of Nick Cave on "Love Is The Law" and packing, in just over forty minutes, a plethora of emotions that disorients the fleeting but drags the curious into a sonic exploration rich with fascination: "Oh My Days" is an album to love or ignore with no compromise; we love it.

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17/02/2011