Rowan:Morrison – In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses
MillerSounds – 1 January 2019
For just over a decade now, songwriter and singer and musician Stephen Stannard (aka The Rowan Amber Mill) has been a prolific practitioner of a variety of alt-folk that’s been specifically (and to my mind pretty accurately) branded as “woodland folkadelica”. His Bandcamp site lists eight releases, several of which have featured the singing of Angeline Morrison, and the two performers have come together again now to bring us this rather wonderful new 17-track set. It’s unquestionably a concept album, and one with a clear message. Its narrative takes a snapshot of an imagined history of the land, and “explores themes of our beautiful natural surroundings, and how the pursuit of profit guides us to learn ‘the cost of everything and the value of nothing’, paving the way for the scarring of the landscape with fracking, HS2, retail parks, and so on… It explores the conflict taking place at the same area (The Ridgeway) through time periods between the land and man with their developing technologies. These events take place throughout time, from pre-history through to the near-future.”
In its CD incarnation (a vinyl version is also available), the album is fantastically and imaginatively packaged. The vinyl-replica-style disc itself is anchored within a silver metal tin (somewhat akin to a cigarette-case perhaps); also enclosed therein we find three strange but intensely beautiful photographs, a sticker, three complementary badges, and – most importantly – a foldout booklet presenting full lyrics, credits and Stephen’s explanatory liner notes. The latter tells us that this concept album was inspired both by Stephen’s wanderings along the majestic landscape in and around the Ridgeway and by his “sadness, incredulity and anger at those in positions of power who seek to act with disregard to the sanctity of our national parks, ancient monuments and forests”. The narrative and music presented on the album thus confirm and amplify the exploration of the conflict between man, their machines and the land itself, and fragments of experience and memory bleed into and out of each other through the lyrics as they straddle and interweave different time zones. Conflicting emotions can be so fascinating…
The musical style of the album is both enrapturing and invigorating, ambient yet upfront, and the listener is drawn in immediately, falling under the spell of the quiet beauty of the singing with its impeccable diction and the lovingly curated yet understated “folk-orchestral” arrangements which involve swooning string textures, glistening keys, pastoral reeds and woodwinds and rippling acoustic guitars. The instrumental colourings are rich and gently opulent, with an overall effect oddly not unlike the “drifty” side of early Pink Floyd at times. There’s a keenly accomplished use of multitracking, both enhancing and enhanced by the often layered and occasionally quite complex vocal parts. The songs form a continuous sequence, and (to be fair) it can sometimes be difficult to separate them into discrete self-contained creations, thus doesn’t readily lend itself to the kind of track-by-track analysis such as the reader might expect here, so expert is the flow of the storytelling and so seamless the musical invention. So much so that it could be argued that this is both the album’s strength and its Achilles heel. The end of the disc’s 74 minutes – which includes a few minutes of silence (pondering time?) prior to the Afterlogue (a spoken extract from the enigmatic At The Circle’s End) – comes with almost a feeling of resigned exhaustion (now who was it said that “a surfeit of beauty almost tires the soul”?). And yet the continuous level of enchantment is such that the listener is nevertheless compelled to re-live the experience quite soon.
In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses is an ambitious and necessarily thought-provoking work and makes an important and powerful statement that proves both irresistible and cumulatively convincing.
Order now via Bandcamp: https://rowanambermill.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-sunshine-we-rode-the-horses