West My Friend – In Constellation
Grammar Fight Records – 8 November 2019
For their fourth album, Canadian trio West My Friend (previously featured on Folk Radio) have enlisted a full symphony orchestra and choir to augment their melodic brand of guitar, mandolin and accordion flavoured folk.
They open in unaccompanied mode with Eden Oliver bringing blues and scat influences to bear on Fall Knows, a song that draws on the cycle of the seasons, in particular autumn and winter, to affirm that, while the leaves may fall, they will come again. The orchestra makes its bow with Salt Water, swelling strings and choral backing vocals complementing the acoustic guitar as Oliver sings about not missing the moment by having a “head full of bees and heart preoccupied” as it builds to a tumultuous climax “ marvelling at each wave”.
Featuring mandolin by Alex Rempel and Jeff Poynter on piano, Build A Bed is a straightforward invitation to romance as she that declares that, if the object of her affection affords a “trusty guarantee”, she will “drink you inexhaustively as if you were the honey in my tea.”
Sounding as if it might have come from a 40s Bing Crosby or Judy Garland musical, Old Song is a dreamy, shimmering strings, tempo shifting affair, except the lyrics reveal themselves as a call for social change and that “to make a difference/We have to make the difference”, the final verse turning to urban pollution as Oliver sings “you can hear the people say/We need cars for job for homes for kids whose kids will have to live with this/And you can almost hear the future crying out stop”.
Returning to the search for love, it quietly underpins the slower, moodier Shape of a Home with its ebb and flow of melancholic cello and violins, looking for “memories I want to keep” and “a little trust in the falls” to fill the “hole in the shape of a home in my heart”.
Mortality and making life count bedrock the pizzicato strings and woodwinds arrangement of All These Things (“I like to think that there is no ending/That we just keep going on and on/And you like to think that it’s more like going home/With your favourite chesterfield and your favourite cup of tea”), the lyrics providing the album title as the brass swells and Oliver remembers the food her grandmother used to make, unsure that “they’ll be there the next time around” so wanting to “think that I’d spent every minite of my life/On something beautiful, useful, or bright”.
It closes with a flutter of strings opening the airily sung An Education, woodwinds and harp dancing across the melodic clouds, again conjuring vintage Hollywood or Broadway musical romances, here seeing regrets as part of the memories we store of a life lived and the lessons we have learnt, Oliver putting a spin on the usual romantic dreams by avowing “I hope with you/All that I have are regrets/And I know with you/Each moment could be one to be learned from”.
Quite how it’ll sound when they tour Europe as a three-piece in Spring next year remains to be heard, but, deeper than it superficially appears from the lushness of its surroundings, it’s definitely a constellation you want to train your musical telescope on as already previously attested to here on Folk Radio.