David A Jaycock – Murder, and the Birds
Triassic Tusk Records – 24 August 2020
David A. Jaycock has long been something of an outlier, his music skirting the periphery of traditional folk, hauntology and the whimsy of 1970s English baroque pop. Too conceptual to be trad, too tuneful to be avant-garde, his is a music of edgelands, situated somewhere between David Tibet and Robyn Hitchcock. His last solo album, 2018’s The Decline of the Mobile Library, was entirely instrumental, and showcased his love for the spooky-charming side of British twentieth-century music, all rickety synths, folk-rock rhythms, gentle but highly accomplished guitar playing and a smattering of soft piano, on the very limit of perception. Prior to that, he made two excellent albums with Marry Waterson, on which she did most of the singing while he provided the beautiful and subtle musical backdrop.
So it’s good to hear his voice – gentle but distinctive – come to the fore on a hushed, haunted version of folk staple John Barleycorn, the opening song on Murder, And The Birds. Jaycock’s inspiration has always come from the darker recesses of folkloric history, and it’s no different here: after the comparative familiarity of John Barleycorn, we are plunged into a more esoteric realm with the weird and wonderful Pendle Hill, which begins by praising the Lancashire village of the title, before examining its past as a famous haunt of witches.
This kind of ambiguity where place is concerned is the major theme of the album. Jaycock is interested in home as a concept, but also in the idea that places can have an inherent weirdness or otherness. Pendle Hill is one of a number of Lancashire songs he has chosen to tackle, and he seems to be interrogating the possibility that a place can be both homely and unheimlich. While his outlook is contemporary, his recording methods are rooted somewhere in the mid to late 20th century. While the imagery is seen through a gothic lens, it sings with a language of greater antiquity, of the pre-Christian strangeness of these isles.
These dualities are intriguing, and they also feed off and play into another linked idea: that is often impossible to say exactly where home is, even when you are missing it. Jaycock sees himself belonging to both the north-west and the south-west of England, but his choices of song make detours further afield, to places connected by his own private web of belonging. His version of John Barleycorn is from Ayrshire, All My Trials – gentle and deftly fingerpicked – hails from Warwickshire and wonderfully grim Lizzie Wan (incestuous rape and pregnancy, sororicide, the slaughter of various pets) comes from Cambridgeshire.
There is an inherent darkness to many of these songs – songs like The Murderous Huntsman provide a valuable flipside to the idea of Merrie England. Jaycock’s alternative doesn’t advocate clinging blindly to some idealised version of the past – it is stranger and more inclusive. Equally dark is the lengthy ballad Faire Ellen Of Radcliffe (another Lancashire song), an unrelentingly gruesome tale of a stepmother who bakes her husband’s daughter into a pie.
Jaycock’s recording techniques help elevate his songs far above most standard folk fayre. His preoccupation with ambiguity and duality is reflected in his method of double-tracking his vocals, while soundscape of strings and synths gives a ghostly and somehow timeless sheen to many of these songs – The Electric Maid, in particular, is a warped, glistening oddity, while the guitar on Song For The Mayers has the distinct tinge of 70s prog-folk, a briefer and more minimal Mike Oldfield, perhaps. The Lark In The Morning, the album’s sole instrumental, augments the prettiest of melodies with a mournful synth swoon.
Jaycock has previously recorded with James Yorkston, and Yorkston has called him ‘a great English outsider.’ That is the perfect little phrase, really. His music exists both inside and outside of the English tradition. The undeniably beautiful songs of Murder, And The Birds relish the ugly and the odd, and aren’t afraid to document the violence of our history. Jaycock is a master of carefully managed contradictions and a true original.
Murder, and the Birds is out now.
Order via Bandcamp: https://triassictusk.bandcamp.com/album/murder-and-the-birds
Photo Credit: Sarah McAdam