THE MEMORY BAND - A Fair Field

Yet another entry in Stephen Cracknell's ongoing dismantling of the song form, the Memory Band's fifth album is the English folk-rock outfit's most poetic and ancestral project to date. Traditional melodies, field recordings, and vocal and instrumental samples merge to shape a potential post-folk, in which psychedelic hallucinations, spoken voice, and folk melodies in the vein of Pentangle alternate in a lyrical carousel of rare beauty.

Piano is the central element of the band's new sound, the guiding instrument around which occasional collaborations and fragments of readings and songs revolve.

“A Fair Field” is a sonic document, an intergenerational lyrical testament.

The album opens with the voice of Vashti Vincent, taken from a 1954 recording in which the woman tells folk music scholar Peter Kennedy about the discovery of an old song. What follows is an evocative neoclassical instrumental version of “The Bold Grenadier” (a traditional folk tune), sealed by the piano of Fred Thomas.

The whole album is a magical interplay of chamber-folk and pop-folk delights, moving between melancholy piano arrangements, field recordings and electronics in the style of Penguin Café Orchestra (“Against Our Laws Contrary”, “A Postcard For Toppy And Lou”), and melodies laid over string sections and drum machines (“The Mason And The Lark”, the latter accompanied by the spoken voice of poet Basil Bunting). And it's once again a dialogue (William Langland) that introduces another of the album's high points, “The Truth Of My Right Hand”, inspired by another classic of the English tradition, delicately woven from violin, piano and double bass.

“A Fair Field” is a project that breaks the rules of the folk revival, both when it delves into its poppier side (the delicate ballads “On Our Side” and “Children Of The Stones”), and when, with a few listless bass notes, it tempers the harmonic tone of the compositions (“Up The Common”).

The Memory Band's new album reaffirms folk as a multidisciplinary idiom, adding another piece to that new path for popular music already ennobled by artists such as Rob St John and the duo Phelan-Sheppard.

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06/03/2017