Green Ribbons – Green Ribbons
Matière Mémoire – Out Now
First some introductions. Green Ribbons are an unaccompanied vocal quartet featuring Debbie Armour, Frankie Armstrong, Benjamin ‘Jinnwoo’ Webb and Alasdair Roberts. Armour also records as ambient/drone/folk artist Burd Ellen and has featured on Alex Neilson’s solo project, Alex Rex. Frankie Armstrong is a Cumbria-born singer, activist and writer with roughly half a century of recorded output behind her, who has worked with everyone from Louis Killen to Lankum. Jinnwoo is a visual artist, singer and producer from Leicester who has a reputation as one of the UK’s premier photographers of folk and world musicians. And Alasdair Roberts is one of the most prolific, engaging and experimental performers and collaborators in the folk world.
So, the sum of the parts is mighty impressive. But what of the whole? The danger with an album of unaccompanied material is that it might come across as slightly one-dimensional to anyone who isn’t a vocal folk purist, or that it might be a noble but staid exercise in preservation. That’s never going to be a problem here, though, given the sheer eclecticism and creative intent of the artists involved. For one thing, Green Ribbons doesn’t stick to the tried and trusted material. True, nine of the thirteen tracks are at least partly traditional, but many of the melodies and arrangements are highly original, and the songs’ sources are frequently unusual. The Well Below The Valley, a Debbie Armour arrangement with a stirring refrain that belies the dark ambiguity of the rest of the song, is taken from the Irish traveller tradition. Its inherent weirdness is captured perfectly.
Elsewhere, Armour treats us to a delightful children’s skipping song from Scotland, Jeannie Jenkins, which she learned from the singing of Isla St Clair. It finds its echo in Ima Nema, a brief but beguiling snippet of Bulgarian folk song. Her stunning Lady Margaret, complete with ‘grisly ghost’, finishes the album in a suitably dark style.
Perhaps the biggest revelation on the album is how well-suited Jinnwoo’s voice is to this kind of singing. His rendition of the title track is astonishing for its immediacy, and his voice is wonderfully rough and saturated in emotion. He carries this emotion into his own compositions, which include Garden Song, an ostensibly simple list song with its roots in a very contemporary kind of sadness. His writing is as impressive as his singing: Sea Snake Island sees him transplant ancient themes into a modern context. On Softly Spoken Man he revisits a song he had previously recorded with a full band. Once again the lyrics hint at the darkness lurking in the everyday.
Roberts’ My Geordie, Oh marries well-known Scottish melody to a more uncommon lyric. The final chorus, when Armstrong’s voice joins the others, reminds you of just how different, and how unique, each of these artists is. Roberts also treats us to the incredibly tender The Heathery Hills, a song of longing for a place and for a person, and Here’s A Health Unto All True Lovers, a beautiful duet with Armour taken from the singing of Mary Doran, a traveller singer from County Wexford.
Even as Frankie Armstrong enters her eightieth year, her voice is still a paragon of clarity and control. A Question is a passionate protest song of her own composition which shows a neat turn of phrase – ‘the meek shall inherit the blame’ – to go with the fiery singing. A Week Before Easter – one of the albums more well-known traditional songs – is sung with a freshness and beauty that makes its familiar melody seem new.
And newness is an underestimated component of collaborations such as this one, where mainly old songs are sung in a broadly traditional way. On Green Ribbons, each singer brings something unique and subtly experimental to the table, and the result is a collection of songs that transcends genre and fuses the history of vocal music with the most exciting aspects of its present.
GREEN RIBBONS is out now on limited edition green vinyl and on CD by Belgian label Matière Mémoire. Order it here: https://www.matiere-memoire.com/
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