Harrow Fair – Sins We Made
Roaring Girl Records – 17 April 2020
The sophomore outing by Canadian duo Miranda Mulholland (from Great Lake Swimmers) and Andrew Penner blasts out of the starting gate with the title track, Sins We Made, a mountain music stomp and hollering social commentary in the folk song counting tradition that, counting from 1 to 8, addresses news issues of the past few years in a coded manner, such as “One for the lamb to the slaughter/Two for the Queen of Spades/Three for the Gatekeeper’s Daughter” and so on, though you’ll have to be better than I at cryptic clues to decipher
They crank the groove up even more with the loping stridency of Rules of Engagement, a blues boogie with T Rex hints about standing up to a bully (“I’ve heard enough of your excuses,/I’ve weathered all of your abuses,/So it’s time for you to sit right down and hear what I have got to say”), before reining back slightly for the fiddle-driven close harmony acoustic country Dark Gets Close as they sing how there’s “no courage without fear”, calling Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ to mind in the lines
When your choice is clear
And your voice is clearer
But your foot falls short
And your destination’s lost
When the road gets hard but
you’ll fail harder
And lessons learned
Will be rivers that you crossed
heading into an almost hoedown thigh-slapping sound towards the end.
Mulholland’s spooked Appalachian violin sets the scene for the moodier Seat At The Table, a call for community in troubled times and the pride in honest toil with a slow lurch drum rhythm. And from coming together to walking away as, backdropped by plucked violin, the duo share verses on the spare Loved You Enough, a song about loving someone enough to find the strength to leave when it’s the kinder thing to do.
Handclaps provide the choppy backing to I Saw It In The Mail, a gospel stomp that progresses from being largely unaccompanied to introducing and building to a fever with drums, fiddle and guitars on a song that serves as a reminder not to be predictable (“that look in your eyes says that you’re on the defensive…so just come clean, cause I know what you did”).
Mulholland’s violin takes centre stage for Shiloh, an instrumental lament titled for the Tennessee Civil War battlefield (though with a definite Irish air) accompanied by military marching beat drums as it builds to a rousing crescendo as the dawn rises and battle is readied.
There’s a conscious 60s girl doo-wop pop throwback flavour to I Just Wanna, the pair trading singing a playful twangy guitar-backed lyric about how phrases like shoop-shoop and shama lama ding dong used to be veiled ways of singing about sex on the radio. But then, riding a dramatic violin flourish like some spaghetti western motif, Shadow shifts the mood from rose-tinted innocence to the curse of addiction (“It swallows me and won’t let go”), putting me in mind of the halcyon days of Lee and Nancy. Or perhaps a noir Esther and Abi Ofarim.
They end with the album’s most restrained track, Rich Looks Cheap To Me, a slow waltzing, violin accompanied, strummed number about loving someone for who they are that, like My Darling Clementine, draws on those old school country duets.
A truly terrific album, indulge in the sins they’ve made, and listen and repent at listening leisure.
Their Listening Party premieres today on Youtube (10 pm UK / 5 pm EST) here
Photo by Jen Squires