Burnt Paw – Lunar Vortex Incantations
Self-released – 1 March 2019
Listening to Edinburgh-based songwriter Burnt Paw, the first thing you notice is his beautiful fingerpicking, echoing some of the great British folk guitarists from the 60s. On his new album ‘Lunar Vortex Incantations’, he claims to be influenced by artists on both sides of the Atlantic and UK listeners will no doubt hear the likes of John Martyn, Pentangle and more recently James Blackshaw. However, the apparent influence of more esoteric players from the other side of the pond, like Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny, also draws in eastern tones and moods – particularly on opening track Diamond Fire. The overall vibe of his guitar on the album certainly hints towards the mystic.
Burnt Paw’s lyrics and song titles are also referential, drawing on various Celtic images and mythologies around distant ‘shores’, magical ‘stones’ and ‘hollow caves’. Though he notes Walt Whitman as an influence, the album also has a fantasy feel to it, though probably more in the melancholy mode of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant than in the vein of any Tolkienian epic.
But he also forges his own loose, vaguely mysterious narrative. On the first track, a character called ‘Catherine’ has an ‘ambition to become a mountain wolf’, and when on penultimate track Fire Maidens he sings ‘we left our bones to the wolves / do you have the strength to return the gaze to the fire maidens’ you wonder whether she succeeded. Feminine notions of life and death – whether that’s ‘fire maidens’ or Catherine – also recur.
These two tracks, in particular, can in many ways be seen as containing the essence of the album’s narrative. Beginning with Diamond Fire, he hears a hawk’s call ‘deep in my bones’, this call being ‘the diamond fire’ which also calls Catherine to become the mountain wolf. By the time we get to Fire Maidens, in an apocalyptic setting where ‘four riders came from the land’, he sings:
‘we left our skins by the side of the road
we left our bones to the wolves
do you have the strength to return the gaze
of the fire maidens?’
What his narrative seems to encapsulate is a journey from his hearing the call of life to his coming to terms with death, a journey he invites us to join as the first person singular of the first half of the album makes way to a collective ‘we’ in the second.
On the tracks in between, the message is to enjoy the journey for what it is, our lives borrowed as they are and therefore impermanent – a ‘fire’ which will eventually flicker out. This message is most arrestingly conveyed on one of the album’s standout tracks, Amber Cave, where a journey to find the titular destination never comes to fruition, but it’s the things he picks up along the way that he keeps, namely ’a rusted spade, an emerald sword, and a mask of jade’.
There are a couple of moments where the lyrics veer towards cliche, such is the preponderance with well-worn mythic imagery and the oft-told journey through life and death, but fortunately, his guitar playing compensates. On Arthur’s Seat, for instance, wondering about seasons in ‘the hills of no return’ is given a deeper melancholy by a mournful piano that quietly caresses the mournful guitar, which itself subtly shifts with the thumbed bass string of the chord changing around the halfway mark, giving it a warmer resonance. On Field in Albion, the guitar playing compellingly shifts in pace and tone around the Whitmanesque mutterings about being ‘wiser than acorns’ but ‘poorer than the sparrows’ – whatever all that means.
Overall the album’s message is one of peace, or more accurately, peacefulness. On the irresistibly pretty instrumental tracks Sacred Grove and Emanations he even reaches a level of transcendence. As he strums hopefully on the closer Silver Antlers, his journeying is absorbed into a lunar abstraction, the moon being ‘a crown of silver antlers to illuminate the drowning road’.
On his Bandcamp page, he says that the album was ‘born on the side of a hilltop under a ruined tower below a silver crescent’, and the accompanying artwork points to the album’s grasp to the permanence of the moon, stars and sun beyond our borrowed lives. Indeed, ‘Lunar Vortex Incantations’ is unapologetically pagan in its motifs, but in referring to such innate, almost prehistoric versions of wonder, Burnt Paw does indeed generate a sense of mystic awe. As he notes in his Bandcamp address to the listener, ‘moon blessings’ to us all indeed.
https://burntpaw.bandcamp.com/