Stick in the Wheel – Hold Fast
From Here Records – 21 August 2020
It hasn’t taken Stick In The Wheel long to progress from puckish upstarts to critical darlings. In the five years since their debut, From Here (2015), they have established themselves as one of the most admired and daring groups working under the folk banner. It’s not just the folk music press that loves them either: Pitchfork, The Guardian and the BBC are all on board. But success hasn’t mellowed them. On Hold Fast – their third album proper – they are more searingly honest and politically charged than ever, while their music retains all the DIY energy that made them such a refreshing addition to the music scene. They now operate as a duo of core members Nicola Kearey (vocals) and Ian Carter (guitar and production), but the cast of co-contributors is impressive, and they seem more like a band than ever.
Hold Fast begins with a sense of foreboding, a repetitive, cyclical rhythm that ties the opening song A Tree Must Stand In The Earth to its themes of nature. It has the feel of a pagan rite, and the electric guitar sounds somehow ancient, especially in the song’s improvised final moments. Stick In The Wheel are considered a London-centred band whose stock-in-trade is a kind of punky urban folk music, but here they prove they can set foot in the wild world of Saxon Britain and conjure up an old kind of magic. The lyrics are adapted from the 10th century Exeter Book, whose poetry documents a time when the ostensibly Christian Britains were still very much under the influence of pre-Christian lore – the country’s customs have never been as pure as some would have you believe, and Stick In The Wheel are quick to recognise Britain for the magpie nation that it is. They are also quick to celebrate that diversity.
It’s back to London soon enough though, with Budg & Snudg, a song rendered in the obscure and tantalising slang of the 17th-century criminal underworld. It provides the perfect showcase for Kearey’s vocals. There are shades of the Pogues in the speed and clatter of the arrangement, and John Kirkpatrick’s rollicking morris-style melodeon makes the whole thing a thrilling ride. Villon Song – with words written in the late 1800s by W. E. Henley, employs even knottier slang, including Polari. On paper, it resembles some kind of dadaist playground rhyme, but Kearey’s chanting delivery and the martial rumble of the rhythm section (drummer Sian Monaghan is particularly impressive here) the darker meanings of the words begin to make themselves apparent.
Lead single Fake Away also uses slang, backed by music that takes inspiration from Romani, Yiddish and English traditions. These strange and often unyielding combinations of words and music help create interesting soundworlds, but more importantly, they provide links to neglected ways of life and give a voice to cultures that have traditionally been subjected to oppression.
They cast their net even wider in Top Knot, which takes its cue from Yiddish and Manouche musical cultures. The lyrics – written in the early 18th century – describe a seemingly trivial example of what is essentially a form of sexual harassment. The song’s minimal arrangement – just Carter’s guitar and Kearey’s voice – gives the song a winning frankness. The guitars here are often more prevalent than on previous Stick In The Wheel releases: Gold So Red strays into startling psych-rock territory, while Soldier Soldier (a Rudyard Kipling poem with a pertinent and contemporary anti-war message) has a stripped-back strum that plays on the edges of melody and discordance. But the duo are not afraid to experiment with synths, most strikingly on the haunting Possible Reasons For Eventual Admission To The Asylum, a list song based on a recent meme. Here Kearey’s voice, higher than usual and shorn of its distinctive accent, soars around the ascending synth pattern with a result that is as gorgeous as it is disconcerting.
This is symptomatic of a very particular and highly original approach to arranging songs or texts from a historical period and locating them within a framework that draws from modern, contemporary or even futuristic settings. Calling it retro-futurism doesn’t do it justice – Stick In The Wheel’s music contains none of the nostalgia or revisionism that that phrase implies. There is something vibrant and essential about the way they use the squall of a lysergic guitar or the locked-in groove of a minimal synth to carry a message that is relevant or touching. Drive The Cold Winter Away is a perfect example: robotic, repetitive electronics (think Kraftwerk or even Steve Reich) only serve to drive home the importance of the song’s ostensibly ancient themes. Similarly, Nine Herbs Charm takes a 10th century charm and marries it to a perfectly post-apocalyptic dub soundtrack. It is the perfect mixture of urban and rural, of London past and London future.
The final track, Forward, is perhaps the most potent example of the almost alchemical way the pair fuse the ancient and the modern. The treated vocals and rippling synths hint at some kind of future-pop madness: there’s even a hint (albeit a downbeat hint) of the playful modernism of PC Music in there, except the bubblegum lyrics are replaced with a message of urban utopianism based on a Yiddish lament. It’s an incredible moment in which you can hear one of the many possible futures of folk music beginning to play out. And yet what is perhaps more important is the fact that you can also hear a possible future of society, and it is a future based on hope and the tolerance of difference. This is what Stick In The Wheel have always been about. Their acceptance of diverse musical forms reflects their radical desire to change things for the better, and on Hold Fast they have begun in a small way to make that change possible. It is an urgent and quite brilliant album.
Order/Pre-Save Hold Fast: https://stickinthewheel.lnk.to/holdfast