Eliza Carthy & Ben Seal – Through That Sound (My Secret Was Made Known)
Hem Hem Records (HHR20201) – Out Now
Eliza Carthy’s latest record finds her returning to her own songwriting in a set that collects together nine new songs and one cover. Stylistically, it’s quite a contrast from the more traditional-folk-inflected Restitute package that Eliza released last year, and much of its unusual, yet quirkily accessible flavour is characterised by the signature hand of Fife-based composer, musician, songwriter and producer-arranger Ben Seal. Oh yes, and the surreal, phantasmagorical artwork by Kirsty Whiten…
The pervasive, nay dominant musical climate here is a kind of arty-jazz-cabaret, almost a latter-day Kurt Weill with its occasional chamber-orchestral eruptions but also making deliberate sidesteps into edgy techno. For the folk traditionalist, therefore, much of Through That Sound will be difficult and challenging – even alien. So you need to approach the album with differently-tuned ears. In which connection, note that the crack ensemble of accompanying musicians assembled by Ben comprises The Gift Band’s Phil Alexander on keys, Willy Molleson of Eliza’s Wayward Band on drums, Rick Standley on double bass, Pete Furniss on bass clarinet, and the string quartet Mr McFall’s Chamber.
Any “folky” notions or inferences tend to be of the “blink and you’ll miss ’em” brand of subliminal-incidental, or else well buried in the seemingly wilful mix of inspirations. Rather, folk memory (in the wider cultural sense) would appear to be an informing concept, and this may either take the form of momentary partially-recalled song or folksong phrases or else the ghost of Lal Waterson wandering across the frame intermittently and emerging enigmatically into the light of day. These very particular elements, combined with Ben’s scintillatingly ephemeral yet somehow attention-grabbing arrangements, serve to lend the whole affair an unsettling, hard-to-quite-place slightly queasy ambience whose texturing nevertheless cries out loud for further investigation – that is, once you get past or beyond Eliza’s telling (if at times also almost compulsorily oblique, even a touch impenetrable) lyrics (and yes, I do wish they’d been printed in the booklet).
The album begins with the woozily off-kilter jazzy-triple-time of Ships Passing, its disturbed and dissonant musical setting uncannily mirroring the plight of its protagonists, ostensibly (according to Eliza’s booklet note) travelling people whose disrupted lives and loyalties are invoked in the lyric but sounding to me more like a Costello-style exploration of the time-immemorial “ships passing” scenario of everyday life. The darker shadings of The Black Queen, with their delicately balanced gamelan of xylo-blocks, strings and clarinet, surround a middle-eight in which is couched the album’s sincerest and most overt tribute to “aunty Lal” (Eliza began writing this song when Lal Waterson died). Pulsing electronic beats and handclaps steer our bodies through the self-styled “domestic-abuse disco-tango” of Our Savage Friends, drawing us down into a sparser, clarinet-soaked intimacy for a personal declaration that takes the form of a pained revelation.
Then comes the sensuous portrait of The Lute Girl; set to slinky vibes and languidly swinging half-drunken rhythm, this is the first song in an intended trilogy based on a specific book. Further on into the album, we encounter the trilogy’s second part, the rather cryptically titled Musa, Part 1 (The Death Of The King), an even more restlessly scored and fidgety meditation on death as the result of excess.
Three other tracks appear to carry contiguous themes which might perhaps have been seen as candidates for the above-mentioned trilogy. Hey Joe (which carries its own sly paraphrase from the ubiquitous 60s Hendrix warhorse) presents an arguably even more itchy perspective on death (almost casually listed as “another fallen storyteller”) through a freewheeling, rough ‘n’ ready rat-pack vocal and a backdrop of dissonant, free-jazz-style cacophonous squawking and tumbling rhythm. Before that, Surrender incorporates elements of both resentment and resilience for its dissection of, and reflection on, the life of a single parent. And then there’s Neptune (now boasting its full title, complete with playful qualifying parenthesis of In The Stars Wants His Bloody Pound Of Fish). This song comes across as a (with hindsight) somewhat regretful song concerning the vulnerability and illusions of puberty. It was co-written with David “Demus” Donnelly during the seven-year recordings for Eliza’s 2008 album Dreams Of Breathing Underwater and subsequently (in keeping with the unwritten laws of album naming) omitted from the 2011 album that actually bore the title Neptune.
Tucked in between Neptune and Surrender, but in truth and stature more than the interlude its placing might suggest, is the album’s one cover – the old standard Mean To Me, which was penned in 1929 by Fred E. Ahlert and Roy Turk and a big seller that year for Ruth Etting (although later probably more familiar from Ella Fitzgerald’s swinging revamp). Here, though, Eliza’s rendition is significantly closer to Doris Day’s sublime version on the 1955 Ruth Etting biopic Love Me Or Leave Me; it sports an idiomatic lazy-late-night-jazz-lounge vibe that ideally complements the musical character of the rest of the album. Even the song’s title can be taken literally too, certainly in the sense of how much Eliza clearly feels it does “mean to me” since it was sung by both her mother and aunt. And by the way, this track is something of a première in that it features, for the first time (and hopefully not the last!), Ben’s own singing voice – in a kind of duet role alongside Pete’s clarinet solo midway through.
How then to close proceedings? In time-honoured showtime tradition with a steady homeward-treading beat, with a good-natured, if slightly sentimental late-40s/50s-style anthem Until Then, which is even subtitled The Goodnight Song. Although it fulfils its function well enough here, I can’t help feeling a touch of self-conscious torchiness – even perhaps crowd-pleasing predictability (or inevitability) – about this song, which seems almost too “easy” a comedown after the emotional challenges of what’s gone before – in which context maybe Mean To Me would have rounded the album off more satisfyingly for me. But of course, you may well feel differently.
All that aside, it’s a real pleasure to welcome Eliza into our living-rooms again, and her latest batch of thought-provoking and unusually contoured songs is presented in the context of a fruitful new musical collaboration – so come to the cabaret!
Available to order here: https://www.eliza-carthy.com/product/sound-secret-made-known/