Arborist – A Northern View
Rollercoaster Records – 7 February 2020
A Nothern View is the second album from Arborist, the Belfast fluid five-piece fronted by Mark McCambridge. The album is much informed by the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland; indeed the band provided the soundtrack for the documentary Brexit: A Cry From The Irish Border narrated by Stephen Rea.
It opens with McCambridge’s keening voice on A Stranger Heart, reverb guitar and rolling drums washing behind the vocals, the title giving rise to some interesting extended metaphors (“I hung-out in the arteries for you to come/With the taste of your blood on the tip of my tongue”) not to mention references to four different varieties of red flowers. Floral imagery (“Like a blood-rush from a thumb pricked upon a rose”) also crops up as, evocative at times of early REM but with a softer vocal tone, rumbling drums and chiming guitars welcome Here Comes The Devil, McCambridge again singing metaphorically of darkness and shadows and a “sleeping flower mantis ready to unload” and the song takes on a woozier ambience as it fades towards the end.
Despite its title, the enigmatic (“now I cough with the timbre of your voice”) The Guttural Blues with its literary allusions is actually a fairly muted piece with a repetitive piano pattern, followed by Taxi, a spoken monologue accompanied by Emma Smith’s violin, that recounts the possibly apocryphal story of how McCambridge’s father’s cousin, Harry (the track titled after his band), imparted Phil Lynott “the grand idea” of giving the traditional Irish Whiskey In The Jar a rock makeover, but also sketching a portrait of 60s Belfast and Dublin with their “musicians and would-be poets” and “a steady flow of brimming pints”, before Harry’s eventual fate brings a downbeat ending to the tale, albeit with a brilliant last line.
Mordant piano, tapping percussion, violin and pedal steel herald From the Sagging Bough of a Maple with its image of enervation (“you don’t want to go out well I don’t either”) as it curls into a dreamy country melody around a theme of new shoots. Then, marking the mid-point and adorned with lush floating strings, By Rote is a gorgeous honeyed late night last dance about becoming a musician (“I remember watching your hands upon the off-white keys/O the hollow chords how they’ve stayed with me/Following your finger trace across every word/And here I am still trying to repeat what I’ve learnt”), expressing a profoundly ruminative lament as he sings “Perhaps I’m now confusing real life with song/I thought I knew the difference, but I was wrong/Once there were boundaries, but now they’re gone”.
The 58-second echoey hymnal The Dark and the Moon with its choral voices and hint of violin preludes the quest for a place to belong that is the piano-led shimmers of Don’t Let The Sky Take Me, a “search of a little piece of earth” that journeys through Co. Antrim to Evishacrow, Legagrane and Tuftarney again accompanied by choral voices. Then along come horns to add a warm glow to the deeply if unexpectedly romantic soulfulness of Can I Add You to My Will? with such lines as “Our love it won’t bend just how we choose it’s not eternal but constantly renewed/A ring indeed is no guarantee/For who’s gonna love you when I’m old and frail and ill” and the practical but poignant “May death, when it comes, come to me late and I’d like in some way to compensate/You for the loss and part of the cost”.
A sense of an ending (“I never wanted to go, but now it seems that I might”) and exhaustion (“I haven’t seen the sunshine in nearly a month/I’ve retreated, I’ve drawn the blinds/I need a little space so I can unwind”) equally informs Too Much On My Mind, an reluctant relationship collapse number (“Now all of the good things you wanted are yours/And only this bottle is mine”) where “the hanging rope is squeezing tight”, into which you can read both personal and, given the album’s backdrop, political resignation.
Coloured by strings, keyboards and squally guitar and brass, it ends then in epic six-minute style with title track fusing the two in slow-building testament to endurance and defiance, born “at the edge of a dark and restless sea” and “guided silently/Through a night sky gently shifting by degrees”, the landscape offering an elemental sense of renewal and hope in troubled times as, perhaps imbued with the spirit of Yeats and Joyce, he sings of being “the father of a new breed not prone to fighting” and of falling in love “with the roadside’s yellow-flowered gorse”, declaring “I went out wandering on my dying day/Singing, ‘I’m here to stay’” as the track gently ebbs away.
An arborist, should you be wondering, is someone who focuses on the health and safety of individual plants and trees, often within a landscape ecosystem. As such, McCambridge has cultivated a distinctive musical arboretum within which the emotional panorama and insightful perspective afforded by A Northern View has resulted in a powerful and compelling album, as well as one of the best musical responses to Brexit to date.
Live Dates
Wed 5th Feb 2020 – Mothers Ruin, BRISTOL [w/ Kacy & Clayton]
Thurs 6th Feb 2020 – Fat Lils, WITNEY [w/ Kacy & Clayton]
Fri 7th Feb 2020 – St Davids City Hall, ST.DAVIDS, WALES [w/ Kacy & Clayton]
Sat 8th Feb 2020 – Rollercoaster Records, KILKENNY [In-Store]
Web 19th Feb 2020 – The Black Gate, GALWAY
Sat 22nd Feb 2020 – Phil Grimes, WATERFORD
Sun 23rd Feb 2020 – Coughlans, CORK
Fri 28th Feb 2020 – The Menagerie, BELFAST
Sat 29th Feb 2020 – The Set Theatre, KILKENNY