India Electric Co. – The Gap
Shoelay Music – 1 May 2020
After their trilogy of EPs recorded using traditional instruments in a contemporary manner, Devon-born duo Cole Stacey and Joseph O’Keefe return with their first album in five years. They bring with them that same willingness to experiment with folk forms from different cultures, variously inspired by Irish traditional and Bembe rhythms with the lyrics often drawn from literature, notably the writings of India’s Sarojini Naidu, a leading figure in the struggle for independence.
A rainfall of pizzicato violin notes open and percolate mantra-like through Statues which, I’ll take on trust is, as the notes say, built around a pentatonic ostinato on a touring-themes song basically about juxtaposing standing still and being constantly transient (hence the cover’s camper van, I guess). Drums and violin introduce the samba flavours (though the notes claim eastern European, probably more down to the strings) of Five Senses, played in 7/8 time and pairing Naidu’s description of a 1905 Indian street scene in The Golden Threshold (“at first cymbals beat upon the rousing words that labourers shout/Shelter, temples, fainted notes that falter hushly, languidly they call/Buy more, buy more, rings down the eager street”) with that of contemporary London (“Twilight over, a canopy of torches craving, suddenly unfurl/Little gaining, terraces to sit by, drink up, swooning with the toil”).
Shifting from Asian to American literature, the five-minute ethereal Parachutes with its prepared piano and pulsing plucked fiddle nods to Parachutes My Love Could Carry Us Higher, by the poet Barbara Guest, while the tune is adapted from the traditional Irish The Green Gowned Lass, the track ends in mid-air. Prepared piano and strings again hold the focus for the swirling, enigmatic Scarlet (“Standing by in scarlet/Is what I am/What I was before then/Is what I am”) before Robert Frost’s Acquainted With The Night provides the lyrical inspiration for Great Circles, brushed drums and piano in service of a sub-Saharan seven-stroke Bembe rhythm, Stacey’s vocals soaring and spinning confidently over the landscape.
They turn to the traditional repertoire for Fortune Turns The Wheel, a North East drinking song generally associated with the late Louisa Killen (though also recorded by, among others, Jon Boden and Jackie Oates) but here transformed from the slow lament to a more lusty, uptempo fiddle and accordion number.
Another poet, this time Gloucestershire’s Alfred Williams, provides the basis for the lyrics of Follow The Drum, a recruiting song from an unpublished collection in which assorted villagers leave their trade to sign up, a persistent spare piano pattern and violin underpinning the arrangement. A piano and violin instrumental arrive with The Broken Pledge, the duo incorporating the traditional Irish reel with their own improvisation, and is in turn followed by the syncopated guitars and felt piano of Sparks, a title that well-describes the musical textures, if not the lyrics (“Oh this compromised hand you sway/Even though it’s only when/Sparks fly”). They end with a nod to their time touring as support to Midge Ure, Tempest I and Tempest II embracing synth swirls and scuffs alongside eastern style violin with extracts taken from Tempest Songs, a long-forgotten Victorian poem by Emma Tatham with its call to “Gather round, prepare the harps” as “we hold the lightning struggle for escape”.
A masterful, innovative, highly accomplished and persuasively entertaining work that reinforces their credentials as one of the truly pioneering acts in contemporary folk music, this is one gap you really do need to set your mind to.
Read Rob Bridges recent interview with the duo here.
The Gap is released on 1 May 2020
Order: https://smarturl.it/9nnj7i