Blue Rose Code – With Healings Of The Deepest Kind
Ronachan Songs – 17 July 2020
How many of us spend any time thinking about how an album ‘arrives’? What shower of rain triggered its germination, and how long was it in the making? Was there always a thematic arc to the LP and when did that become apparent; from the beginning, or did it all fall into place after the cover was printed? What songs fell by the wayside? What are these songs? Why are these songs?
It’s easy to imagine for most artists that innumerable variables are at play, from the possibility of wanting to make a grand statement about life and how we live it, to the more prosaic needs, those of paying the mortgage and feeding the children. Some, if not all of these, must filter through the sub-conscious of the musician, but there are some for whom there is a stronger, perhaps uncontrollable imperative, something more akin to the quotation attributed to Mallory about climbing Everest – ‘because it’s there’. They can’t not make music.
Ross Wilson, AKA Blue Rose Code, is one such artist. His new album, the first since 2017s ‘The Water of Leith’ bears all the signs of having been made through necessity, from the clue in the title to the naked, sometimes brutally introspective honesty of the lyrics. Thomas Blake, writing about Blue Rose Code’s debut ‘North Ten’ on this very site in 2013, alluded to how Ross’s pain was held at a distance. Seven years later, another four studio long-players and what must feel like several lifetimes later, that pain is clutched tightly enough that we feel every wound as if it was inflicted yesterday. Hard-won experience and bottom-of-the-barrel despair are just a key change away throughout the album, though if that sounds a little on the maudlin side, fear not, there’s plenty here to raise the spirits too. In fact, this is a largely positive offering.
The same range of instrumentation we’ve come to expect from his particular blend of Caledonian Soul is set to work. Pianos frolic like water in a young brook or tread a careful structure into the foundations, above which strings glide like silk in and out of Jazz-inflected guitar. His use of muted brass and sonorous Sax adds accents in just the right places, or, when given a highlight, as in ‘Denouement’, shine with an improvisational feel that raises your heart rate or hardens the lump in your throat, occasionally both at the same time. A note too about Ross’s voice; I’ve not read enough about how it anchors his songs. The combination of his accent, so rarely portrayed in a singing voice, which tends to flatten regional tenses, and his ability to emote without sounding overwrought, are gifts for this confessional style of songwriting, and once again it glues the disparate influences together into something beyond the whole.
The album starts with a pulse, a muffled heartbeat. Brass introduces a neutral voice intoning Pádraig Ó Tuama’s poem from which the album’s title is taken. From there, sparse, metronomic verses unfold into a string-led chorus built around the refrain ‘You’re here, waiting on your life to start’. ‘You’re Here And Then You’re Gone’ is a measured beginning, a stately meditation on the fleeting moments we may not realise at the time are the ones we should have held tight to. In contrast, ‘Love A Little’ is positively frothy. A little Mandolin, some acoustic guitar and a shuffle beat, but riding the toe-tapping melody is some classic Ross Wilson reflection – ‘It’s only gonna be blind faith that’ll keep me clean and sober for another day’.
That tempo is maintained on ‘LDN City Lights’, which adopts a Dire Straits style walking bass line and some lovely cod-Blues guitar licks to frame memories of Ross’s time in London. The band sound like they’re having fun. There’s a ‘rising of adrenaline’ and a sense of abandon in his request that someone ‘promise me that you’ll promise me nothing more’; a celebration of the immediate, the unplanned, the impetuous.
In ‘Bloom’, the metaphors of renewal and Spring are wrangled together with regret and a plea for understanding. ‘Do you think we find forgiveness for each transgression of our past?’. There’s a beautiful descending melody on the strings through the chorus, and the song is cleverly stationed to slow the pace a little – another signal that Ross’s mastery of the album-making craft has progressed, allowing the song to both shine for itself and be a part of the whole – in readiness for what many will consider to be the centrepiece of the album, the stunning ‘The Wild Atlantic Way’.
Oceanic cymbals, brushed snare and gentle piano chords all act like sea-swell. Ross evokes Celtic landscapes and place-names – something of a trait in his writing. His love of his nation shines through on all his albums, and for those of us hundreds of miles away, we are allowed a glimpse of the rugged romantic vistas north of the border – vast horizons and the verdant greens – of what becomes a mental as well as a physical journey. Lyrically, it’s a simple note of thanks for those brief moments when the stars align and memories are made, echoing the opening track, but wrapped in a melody of such beauty and sung with such longing that you fully believe him when he sings ‘I found the truth that day, along the wild Atlantic way’. On such a journey can inspiration blossom.
In the poignant and all too close-to-the-bone film that accompanies the launch of ‘With Healings..’, Ross says at one point that ‘It’s important that what’s inside is how it sounds’. That one small sentence captures far more eloquently than I can what this album is, a moment of remarkable truth and honesty at a point in his life when he feels comfortable with articulating the rollercoaster he’s been on lately.
‘Starlit’s atmospherics are almost equal to its predecessor, fragile strings and a quivering cello to the fore. The lyric feels like a natural successor, an acceptance of needing to hold your heart wide open to whatever comes along; ‘This world is not just what you see, it’s what you feel.’ By ‘Denouement’, the tempo has rumbled gracefully to walking pace, but alongside ‘You’re Here..’ and ‘The Wild Atlantic Way’, this completes a trilogy of ballads that glues the record together. This story of moving elsewhere to find yourself is gloriously sedentary and the beautiful coda, an elongated, quasi-classical piano melody reminiscent of Ludovico Einaudi feels like a natural ending, but Ross has one more lovely song in his locker.
Riverstown is all about new beginnings. No longer waiting on his life to start, the violins are a lighter echo to the opening song’s heartbeat – the blood is pumping again – and ‘below a lazy sun’ his troubles ‘melt and drift away’.
If there is a theme to this album, it may be that it’s not the journey, but where you arrive, and what you want the future to be once you have. A potentially overpowering aesthetic, but the light touch Ross applies has you sometimes forgetting what it is he must have gone through to achieve that clarity. Woven into each song is the feeling that Ross continues to be grateful for every day that comes along, as should we, if as a result the collective brilliance of his music grows in the way it has over the last decade.
With the minimum of fuss, Blue Rose Code has gathered a rich seam of studio recordings that evidence a talent for songwriting of the old-fashioned kind, where craft is allied to real-life experience, such that every listener can identify within the songs a little piece of themselves, and so better understand the writer because of it. Every new album has been a progression from the last, and ‘With Healings…’ is no different. It should be on everybody’s end-of-year list without fail.
With Healings Of The Deepest Kind is out today
Order via Bandcamp: https://bluerosecode.bandcamp.com/album/with-healings-of-the-deepest-kind