Swimming Bell – Wild Sight
Adventure Club Records – 5 April 2019
Swimming Bell is the nom de musique of Brooklyn-based Katie Schottland. Wild Sight, her debut album, was predominantly crafted in the UK with producer Oli Deacon, it builds on the acoustic nature of her earlier EP, the songs on which were crafted while laid up with a broken foot in 2015 and learning basic guitar chords to Neil Young songs. On her full-length debut, there’s a gentle, woozily bucolic opening with Good Time Man, pedal steel keening behind her crystal stream vocals and lyrical references to hill and goldenrod, a plant renowned for its healing properties.
Multi-tracked vocals bring a choral effect to the sway-along, memory-themed 1988, a reminiscence of falling off her bike and suffering concussion when she was young that gradually dissipates into the ether. There’s an intimate, soothing breeze that blows throughout the album, Brinsley a love song dedicated to the guitarist with 70s country pub rock outfit Brinsley Schwarz burnished with clarinet and airy keyboards (premiered here on Folk Radio), We’d Find evocative of This Mortal Coil’s rendition of Song To The Siren with its layered, spiritual vocals and ambient backing, Quietly Calling a slow waltz under clear prairie skies. Elsewhere, Left Hand Path dances on the rays of light cast by fingerpicked slide guitar, the song bringing a tender sadness with the approaching dawn.
There’s moments when the album bristles slightly, the intoned Wolf’s swirling sonic shapes echoing the lines “I want a wolf in my heart/Wild and free and full of fight”, bleeding into the handclap rhythms, undulating drums and shimmering guitar patterns of Got Things while Love Liked You navigates a path through a soundscape where sonic eruptions burst out like hot springs.
There’s one cover, the dreamy Cold Clear Moon being a simple fingerpicked love song by film composer, actor and chamber folk artist Tomo Nakayama, a perfect complement to Schottland’s own otherworldy enchantments. An intriguing, experimental and at times hypnotic new voice in the world of alt-folk, Schottland’s choice of name comes from a bell-shaped swimming organ to be found in some species of siphonophores, a marine colony order that includes jellyfish and corals that moves by rhythmical contractions. Much like the album.
Wild Sight is out April 5th on Adventure Club Records.