Georgia Ruth – Mai
Bubblewrap Records – Out Now
Back in 2013, singer, songwriter and harpist, Georgia Ruth Williams released her debut album Week Of Pines, which won the Welsh Music Prize for that year and was nominated for two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. It was an enchanting and mesmerising debut, with a distinctive, pervasive musical signature of gentleness and calm that was further in evidence on Georgia’s next album, Fossil Scale (2016), which itself appeared a year or so after her collaboration with The Manic Street Preachers on their 2014 album Futurology.
More recently, after taking a break following the birth of her son, Georgia returned to her home town of Aberystwyth, and in the spring of last year, she recorded the basic tracks for her third album, Mai, in the town’s Grade-2-listed Joseph Parry Hall. Mai is an intimate collection comprising eight songs and three instrumental pieces that were “written from within the depths of a house, during stolen moments, of stories woven around new motherhood, the search for ritual and about being lost and being found again”. Together they form “an exquisite exploration of the natural world, life cycles, of finding hope in the renewal of the seasons, a search for wildness and love”. The Welsh Calan Mai (Mayday) tradition figures large in this collection, where constant subtle references reflect Georgia’s interest in the idea of a struggle between summer and winter, and in particular now that global warming has muddied the seasons. This feeling of seasonal confusion and (in the mind of the listener) almost disbelief gives a potent, waking-dream-like ambience to the album, as Georgia configures both modern and traditional soundscapes into an altogether intriguing and often surprising musical experience.
The twin key elements in this experience are those of Georgia’s own pure, deft vocalising (equally adept whether singing in English or Welsh) and her comparably agile harpistry, but she also brings in piano, guitars and synths to boost the texture on occasion. In addition, she and her co-producer Iwan Morgan have engaged several extra musicians – Iwan and Dafydd Huws (of the band Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog), innovatory violinist Angharad Davies, bassist Stephen Black (of Sweet Baboo), improv-cellist/violist Ailsa Mair Hughes, pedal steel player Rhodri Brooks and flautist/pianist Laura J. Martin – yet their contributions (recorded separately in Iwan’s Liverpool studio) create a feeling of greater spaciousness and depth rather than cluttering the overall picture. The musical styling shifts chameleon-like from soft-toned ambient (album prelude Gardd and the softly throbbing proggish Madryn, dedicated by Georgia to her son) through folk-pastoral (the deceptively delicate Seven Rooms, apparently inspired by Townes Van Zandt), to likeable country-tinged folk-pop (Close For Comfort) and sweet and sugary electropop (Terracotta, a song about heading west and letting the light back in).
While the songs shift chameleon-like between Welsh and English, it would have been nice to have had translations in the accompanying booklet. The title song, it transpires, is a setting of a poem by Eliseus Williams (Eifion Wyn) whose original title translates as “I know it’s coming, month of honey”; it’s characterised by an appealing aura of quivering expectation before the sung text gives way to a glittering, expansive instrumental passage: a very lovely track, this. Another standout track is the “arboretum lullaby” of In Bloom, which was inspired by the garden of a house Georgia once had in Cardiff; its startling imagery of gardens encroaching under doors in the depths of night links thematically with the next song, Cosmos, where Georgia sings “I’d hear the garden breathe in the black night”, and the instrumental timbres are altogether darker (wind-brushed rhythms driven along on deep electric guitar).
The instrumental interlude Brychni is a bit of an oddity, a Satie-esque piano piece apparently inspired by her son catching chicken-pox (the title meaning “spot” or “freckle”). On Cynnes (literally, “warm”), Georgia returns to the theme of conflicting emotional reaction when seasons don’t follow their natural course – the sun in winter can feel sinister, as portrayed in the song’s restless, edgy musical progress. Haul then sees the album out in a wash of seascape.
It’s good to welcome Georgia back, and her third album is an unobtrusive delight where the alternately lush and sparse conjured textures beguile the attentive listener in their careful response to Georgia’s ever-intriguing lyrical vision.
Order Mai via https://bubblewrapcollective.co.uk/product/georgia-ruth-mai/