Softer, more pastoral takes on folk music are hard to get right. Compromises have to be made, otherwise they curdle into tweeness, or float away like dandelion clocks on the air. Bróna McVittie’s 2018 debut, We Are the Wildlife, managed to handle these hazards by meshing together her soft, Northern Irish delivery and bright, precise harp-playing with drones and electronics, adding unusual tones to the ballads she sang, many of which were about nature. It speaks volumes that McVittie is a trained microbiologist outside music. Here’s someone who understands the matter of things in microscopic detail.
The Man in the Mountain begins with The Green Man, a track that could have come straight from Bob Stanley’s brilliant 2004 compilation of lost 60s acid-folk curios, Gather in the Mushrooms. It’s carried along by Anne Garner’s beautiful, intensely eerie flute melody, which amplifies McVittie’s engaging central lyric – “You lie in the depths of my field” – in fascinating ways. Elsewhere on the album, there’s often an 80s ambient feel to the acoustic treatments, paddling the cool waters between the work of Virginia Astley and dreamier Balearic anthologies. This is especially potent in Secretly Between the Shadow and the Soul, inspired by the poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, and the gorgeous, cello-weighted In the Secret Garden.
Two collaborations with electronic duo Isan – including a take on 14th-century Irish folk song Eileen Aroon – are perhaps too gentle, but McVittie’s collaboration with Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen on The Lark in the Clear Air, another Irish folk song, is a revelation. Delivered like a piece of call-and-response improv between her straight, clear voice and his stunning, muted lines, you’re put in the place of a bird navigating wide open landscapes, absorbing light, space and air. This is music that takes you on its wing, and gives you fresh visions.
This month’s other picks
Sally Anne Morgan’s Thread (Thrill Jockey) is a strong solo debut by the House and Land multi-instrumentalist and singer, reviving and reworking Appalachian styles. It enters the folk-rock realm when Jake Xerxes Fussell collaborator Nathan Bowles adds drums, but Morgan is more interesting when freewheeling (like on the curious instrumental Ellemwood Meditation). Belfast-raised Joshua Burnside’s Into the Depths of Hell (self-released) is an album of foreboding, Richard Dawson-like fervour, deliberating colliding political fire and folk fingerpicking in its tales of human degradation. Another Joshua – Burnell – is more theatrical on Flowers Where the Horses Sleep (Misted Valley), adding lashings of Peter Gabriel stylings to the world of trad arrangements.
