Doghouse Roses – We Are Made of Light
Yellowroom Music – 1 November 2019
Next year, Glasgow duo Iona MacDonald and Paul Tasker, mark their fifteenth anniversary as Doghouse Roses, but the celebrations start early with this, their fourth album, one which gathers together previously unrecorded waifs and strays alongside new material. Half are just the two of them on banjo and guitars, the others featuring Neil Allan on percussion and strings by the Pumpkinfield trio.
It starts with Low, a Denny-esque winter set song about displacement created by economic collapse that builds from Tasker’s guitar to enfold bass, drums and strings as Macdonald asks “where’s the money going to come from when the oil dries up?” and sings “I got a dream to just walk away from the mirrors and smoke”. It’s a theme and influence that flows over into the blues-tinged duo tracks One For The Road, a song about seeking escape from the gathering gloom (“we’ve wandered these streets, looking out for bad company to keep”), of missed opportunities and breaking through “to the bones of our needs”.
They break out the clawhammer banjo on The Fermi Paradox, a band number which takes Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi’s argument about the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilisations and the high probability for their existence and applies it to displacement and the need to find solidarity and union on the planet, the track segues directly into a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well recast as a banjo-driven bluesy jig with keyboards from Luigi Pasquini.
While Denny’s regularly trotted out in comparisons, the music and Macdonald’s voice also strikingly call to mind the early psych-folk hued albums of Jefferson Airplane, especially so on both the harmonica-coloured Arsenic, a climate change protest number with Tasker providing harmonies and counterpoint vocals a la Slick and Kantner, and, bolstered by violins, Why We Fight, a commentary the current climate of warmongering and populism that in some ways echoes Airplane’s Volunteers.
Earlier in the album, the spare acoustic First of April is a poignant elegy to the 16 oil workers killed in a helicopter crash off the coast of Aberdeen in 2009, sung in the voice of one of those returning home from the rig. Minimal piano notes complementing the strummed and slide guitar, there’s a different sense of calmness to the love song Rise & Fall before the musical rhythms pick up the pace with the strings providing a backdrop to Years, a fingerpicked number about mortality and the hope in love that brings those Denny echoes make to mind.
Returning to banjo, the folksy Appalachian jog of Elegy For A Seaside Town is again tinged with an air of regret and loss of a once-thriving resort fallen into decay and disrepair, but then they pull out the musical stops as the string trio introduces The Reckoning, a title mirrored in the dramatic intensity of the instrumentation and Macdonald’s vocals as she sings of betrayal and judgement.
It ends, though, on a gentler note, conjuring Richard and Linda Thompson with the slow waltzing reflectiveness of All My Days, a number that mingles loss, regret and acceptance and peace to remember the past but to look to tomorrow. We Are Made of Light shines like a beacon.