Dark-folk Hampshire-based duo Provincials release their second album today. The Dark Ages follows their debut album, Muhzik, released back in 2014 and two EPs, When The Light Changes (2014) and Ascending Summer (2015).
Provincials are the pairing of singer Polly Perry, formerly of Polly & the Billets Doux and guitarist Seb Hunter. Seb is also known as an author, having published the acclaimed cult bestseller Hell Bent for Leather. Ahead of the release of The Dark Ages, Provincials released a video for Skara Brae, filmed by director Clive Tagg which premiered here on Folk Radio UK.
Drawing from jazz, rock and folk Provincials cast a spell, conjuring a resonant, hypnotic soundworld recalling Pentangle, These New Puritans, Talk Talk and David Lynch‘s film soundtracks.
Listen in full to The Dark Ages below and read Seb’s accompanying Track by Track guide to the album.
The Dark Ages Track by Track
Hello, my name is Seb Hunter and I play guitar and occasionally sing in Provincials. I write all the music and Polly writes (the vast majority of) the words. Steve Gibson is the third leg of our musical tripod but doesn’t play on this record because we drifted out of contact for a few years, but he’s back with us now and is going to be ALL OVER our next album, which we’re going to be recording in Spring 2020. In lieu of Steve, our wonderful producer, the insanely talented Dan Parkinson, plays piano & drums on this, our new album, The Dark Ages, released on our own label, Itchen Recordings, the Itchen being the river that flows through our home town of Winchester, Hampshire, in which Polly almost drowns, in the video for Skara Brae, track two, below.
1. March into the Ocean
There was a Scottish poet name of John Davidson who killed himself by weighing his pockets down with stones and walking out into the ocean to drown in Penzance in 1909. We figured this subject was an appropriately cheery way to open our new record. The lyrics are Polly’s mash-up of his poem ‘In Romney Marsh’, Davidson’s own prose lines foretelling his imminent death and verbatim descriptions from the contemporaneous police missing person’s report. The wave-like sounds heard at the start of the track are Polly’s theremin – a Moog Theremini – which we rigged up via multi-effects & delays into a super versatile machine of mayhem & sonic destruction. There’s loads of theremin on this record, none of which sounds anything like a traditional theremin. It’s amazing for texture / atmosphere / drama. The only other instrument on the song is my Martin GPCPA4, I think three or four guitar parts all playing the same thing, to give it HEFT, and Dan playing the tambourine, which is recorded backwards in the middle bit – that classic ‘not sure what to do here, so let’s just try running it backwards’ gambit. I think we’ve done this on every release we’ve ever put out at some point. You can hear the ends of all the guitar tracks at the end as they all spiral out in different directions.
Not all the songs are about drowning.
2. Skara Brae
Just a guitar and voice, going for the starkness, the darkness. Skara Brae is a remote Neolithic settlement in Orkney, the largest surviving village on earth from that period, founded around 3800BC. We have never been there and the site isn’t mentioned anywhere in the song either. It’s an analogy for ancient love or love that feels ancient. By the way, the vocals at the end are supposed to sound like that. Everybody thinks it’s a mistake. Nick Robbins, who mastered the record, emailed saying there was a problem with the end of the song, there’s a load of crackling & distortion on the vocal, could you fix it and get back to me ASAP? No, it’s meant to be like that! It’s meant to be ‘the sound of everything going wrong’. Further analogies. We’ve had this exact conversation with all sorts of people many times now, and it’s always just a teeny tiny little bit awkward.
3. Cat’s Cradle
We use loads of different tunings in Provincials. On this album alone there are SEVEN different guitar tunings. It’s a logistical nightmare and means we have to build setlists around the various tunings, but totally my own fault, and you get used to it in the end. (If you ever wonder why I take so many guitars to gigs, that’s why.) This song is in Robert Fripp’s New Standard Tuning, which I always keep one guitar in permanently, as you have to tune the thin E string up to G, so you’d be constantly breaking strings going in and out of that one. So my (dreamy) Gibson Firebird is always in the Fripp tuning. And it’s the tunings that drive the songwriting process, they unfailingly lead me – us – to the song. I think of this one as an ‘ecstatic rock’ thing, a song about chaos & abandonment in the face of love. The whole drums thing came together so quickly and spontaneously in the studio, entirely unplanned. We were sitting thinking out loud about the possibility of having a few drums on the record, and who and how and so on, and Dan immediately piped up ‘oh I can play drums’ (as well as everything else). His kit was out there in the live room, so he quite literally hopped out and we recorded it live in just a few takes. Weirdly the vocals took ages to get right, which is very unlike Polly: nine times out of ten she nails it in the first few takes. In the end we realised it wasn’t the vocal that was the problem, it was the reverb. As soon as we got that right, the whole song immediately clicked, it was such a huge relief, as we’d been about to leave it off the album. I love this song so much. And I love my Firebird so much too.
4. I Can’t Sleep
I don’t like singing much, I’d rather not do it, but it leavens the record a bit and Polly is supportive. My voice sounds so knackered on this (and closer The Same Sigh) because before we did those two we recorded a full-on bonkers rawk blow-out called One-Armed Swordsman where I go totally Black Francis / Kurt Cobain bug-eyed crazy, which completely blew my voice out and then after all that it didn’t make the final cut for the record as we were persuaded that it might scare people off. I tend to agree. It might make a B-side one day – a Marmite track. I apologise for this particular song note being about a song that’s not actually on the record.
5. The Empire Line
Spanish revenge ballad. Polly’s favourite vocal and you can hear why. Super fun to play. And standard tuning!! At last!!
6. Inkerman
Back in the Robert Fripp tuning. I guess this is the record’s biggest ‘gamble’ – bit Zeppy, ‘La Grange’ / ‘Hot for Teacher’ riff. Dan plays drums again. Psychedelicised theremin. All recorded live but for the vocals. This was, in fact, two songs stuck together – the middle section was originally a completely different song, but it was unfinished. When we were putting together songs to record for the sessions that eventually turned into this album, I thought well let’s just whack that other one into the middle of this one and see if it works, they’re both in the same key. And it worked really well. Made the whole thing into a bit of an epic; Polly comes over very Jex Thoth on this, and her lyrics are amazing.
7. We Lost Our Minds
This is a woozy 3/4 ballad sung from the perspective of a First World War nurse in a convalescent hospital. I love the way the song drifts in through an ether fog of organ, eBow & theremin drones. We do it like that live too, it’s lovely to play. The bass is my baritone Telecaster, which I ache to use more. The middle section was a happy accident – Polly went in and improvised a whole load of descending vocal lines, we sat and listened to them all, couldn’t decide which fitted best so tried them all at once, and bingo! The sound of shell-shocked insanity manifest.
8. Lay On Me
The guitar intro is very (cod) Bach / Baroque. Dan improvised in a Florid Romantic (his favourite) style over the top of that. (I’m still not 100% convinced this intro is right for the rest of the song.) The body of the song is an open Gm7 tuning, which I’ve only ever used for this. We have a demo of this which I prefer, it has really loud birdsong throughout, it’s almost unbelievable, it sounds like a really cheesy OTT sound effect, but it’s actual birds outside the window. We briefly considered adding (fake) birds onto to this studio recording (à la ‘At My Window’ by the Beach Boys) but soon realised how awful that would be.
9. The Western Shore
The most overtly politicised of all the songs on the record, this is an amazing performance from Polly, it was the very last one we did after an entire exhausting day of singing. She sings it in a kind of stark trance, which was probably exactly how she felt at the time. Another gorgeous droney glitchy intro, this time achieved using an MWFX Judder pedal on a home-made ram guitar-type instrument with three strings. Which in fact makes it eight tunings.
10. The Same Sigh
Again, two songs welded together, Layla-style. The song itself we had knocking around for ages, I love playing all those Ry Cooder-style double stops in the verses. Really fun to sing this together too, but it’s hard for me to play this and sing at the same time, so I doubt we’ll ever play it live to be honest. Unless I practise a bit. The second part I flew through in one take at the end of the sole usable take for the previous section. Poor Dan had to add his piano & tambourine etc afterwards, to my lurching out of time guitar. We should have done that again really, done it properly. Please allow your ears to slip out of focus during this section, and please god don’t try tapping your foot to it. Thanks for reading, and see you in the charts.
Order the album via Bandcamp: https://provincials.bandcamp.com/