Brickfields, monkeys and murder - three folk albums reviewed

It was back in 2018 at the Beardy Folk Festival when I first saw Granny’s Attic - three young men who manage to create the authentic sound of traditional English folk music. Quite how three such young men could make such old music – and yet make it sound new and fresh – was a mystery to me.  The trio – Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne (melodeon, anglo concertina), guitarist George Sansome and Lewis Wood (violin) – have been impressing audiences across Europe since 2009 and have released two previous CDs before this month’s new release The Brickfields.

Produced with a micro-grant from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, The Brickfields was recorded live in just three days in April 2021. It’s a fine example of a recent new phenomenon – the post-lockdown album. Having spent most of 2020 scattered in various separate corners of the UK the band couldn’t wait to get together and play again, and that pent-up energy – and the joy of reunion – comes across in the nine superbly-played instrumentals that make up The Brickfields.

If you should meet an alien from the Planet Zog and they ask you what quintessentially English folk music sounds like just point them in the direction of Granny’s Attic.

Another band who are rapidly becoming festival favourites are Southampton-based quartet Monkey See, Monkey Do. Their debut album The Night Out may have been a little overlooked in the chaos of last year. This is music firmly rooted in the English and Irish folk traditions featuring guitar, fiddle and bodhrán with the unusual addition of clarinet. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing the band live but, judging by the cover art and the choice of material, Monkey See Monkey Do seem a lively, fun-loving bunch, with a suitably salty repertoire, from the tale of a wicked pirate called 'Alexander the Great' to 'The Drunken Sailor' (yes, really, that famous drunken sailor who poses such a quandary to his crew mates, ear-ly in the morning.) 

The clarinet blends well with the more conventional instrumentation, particularly on tracks like 'The Night Out and the Hangover' and 'Superfly' (which is apparently unconnected with Curtis Mayfield's funk-soul hit of the same title.)

Monkey See Monkey Do demonstrate how well they play together as a unit on the reels that make up 'The A & E Tunes' and in their full-bodied rendition of 'Farewell to Erin'. With only eight tracks The Night Out is a fast-moving but thoroughly enjoyable selection of songs and dance tunes.

For a more introspective – and altogether stranger take on folk music – you might want to try David A. Jaycock. David has previously collaborated with Marry Waterson and James Yorkston. His album Murder, and the Birds is a dark, eccentric exploration of British traditional folk, inspired by a Victorian anthology called Ballads and Songs of Lancashire. 'Lord Townley's Ghost', 'Pendle Hill' and 'The Murderous Huntsman' are given the Jaycock treatment: detuned acoustic guitar accompaniment and occasional eerie touches of pre-digital synthesisers. 'The Murderous Huntsman' epitomises the sound - a dreamy gem of a track, reworked so as to no longer celebrate the hunter's life so much as his death, leaving the animals and birds free from fear.

Half the tracks originate from Lancashire, half from other regions. Jaycock's version of 'John Barleycorn' is musically rather uneventful and thus is an odd choice as an opening track. But things get more adventurous and more atmospheric as the album progresses.

Jaycock's melodic sense is very Beatlesque. Everywhere there are shades of John Lennon songs and the double-tracked vocals only add to the Lennon effect.

Murder, and the Birds is a quirky, unsettling reimagining of traditional English folk.

The Brickfields by Granny’s Attic is out now on Grimdon Records. Monkey See, Monkey Do’s The Night Out was self-released. Murder, and the Birds by David A. Jaycock was released by the remarkable Triassic Tusk Records - a small label based in the East Neuk of Fife.

Prose dissolving into poetry - 'Dark Neighbourhood' by Vanessa Onwuemezi reviewed

Dark Neighbourhood is a debut in two senses – this is both Vanessa Onwuemezi’s first book of short stories and (I think I’m right in saying) Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first foray into short story collections (alongside their novels, novellas and essays.)

These seven stories make for an unsettling read. I read the opening titular story in August, just as the news was full of the catastrophe at Basra airport, with countless Afghans trying to flee the Taliban. Real world events gave an added sense of eerie desperation to the scene conjured up in Dark Neighbourhood, in which people seem to be queuing at the gate to another world after society has collapsed.

Onwuemezi is experimental in her prose style, the paragraphs of prose often dissolve into lines of free poetry and, in the opening story, the collapse of society is mirrored by a fragmentation – a collapse – of language and meaning. Punctuation is inserted as words – “enough of that (full stop)” – “washed of sweat and blood (comma)” and the author leaves extra spaces between words mid-sentence.

Whether you find these techniques to be effective and arresting or a self-conscious writerly affectation is a matter of taste. At times, I found this formal disruption a distraction from the narrative (in stories where the narrative is often already quite nebulous.) It also somehow made me care less about the characters, perhaps because it made me more aware of the writer behind them. Is it artful, or too clever by half? At the end of Heartbreak at Super 8 there is a final paragraph of prose where it would seem the confused and desperate protagonist has shot himself. His fragmented first-person, present-tense account is followed by a few lines of free verse in his voice. Onwuemezi’s insertion of lines of poetry into the prose reminded me of the way Western film director Sam Peckinpah used slow-motion in the more violent scenes of his films to create a heightened, stylised effect.

There is little lightness or humour in these stories although I did laugh at this rather childlike exchange between characters, which could almost have been some lines from Waiting for Godot:

            “... ‘You’ve not travelled?’

            ‘I have, to some places I remember. To Moscow.’

            ‘Ah Moscow, never been, but I’ve been to Sorrow.’

            ‘A feeling.’

            ‘What?'

            ‘Sorrow is a feeling, not somewhere to go. Perhaps you meant Glasgow?’...”

As one who enjoys the short story form I’m pleased that Fitzcarraldo Editions have, with Dark Neighbourhood, embarked on publishing short story collections. But, too often in reading these stories, I had the impression Onwuemezi would have preferred to have been writing poetry, that she somehow didn’t trust prose fiction enough to create all the effects she wanted to achieve.

Dark Neighbourhood by Vanessa Onwuemezi is published on 6 October 2021 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.