Edgelarks – Henry Martin
Dragonfly Roots – 11 December 2020
Hannah Martin and Phillip Henry (now better known as Edgelarks) are a gregarious presence on the folk music circuit, and they’ve kept some pretty impressive company over the years: from the early days of supporting Seth Lakeman and Show of Hands on tour, performing alongside Kylie Minogue and the Manic Street Preachers as part of the folk-disco project Band of Love, and forming part of former Steeleye Span violinist Peter Knight’s incomparable Gigspanner Big Band. But this year the BBC Folk Award-winning duo were forced by COVID-19 to curtail a tour and retreat to their Devon home, where, like everyone else (particularly those in the creative industries) they were initially beset by doubts about the future of their vocation and the world in general.
But it is a huge testament to the positivity and work ethic of the pair that they turned an ostensibly despondent time into a period of great creativity. The result is an entirely ‘homemade’ album, their first to contain all traditional material. The album’s title isn’t just a combination of the duo’s surnames, it is an old song, normally known by the variant spelling Henry Martyn, collected in Dartmoor by Sabine Baring-Gould. The version here is both rollicking and atmospheric, and provides immediate proof that their precise but flowing musical style is as suited to traditional songs as it is to their original material. Martin’s singing has both depth and clarity, and Henry’s lap steel is played with such emotion that it almost seems to sing.
The popular Greenwood Laddie, which opens the album, bundles along on a funky, bluesy guitar riff, propelled by handclaps and intersected by intriguing bursts of harmonica. The whole thing has a distinctly transatlantic feel, difficult to pin down, sly but soulful. Locks And Bolts is a gentler affair, one of many songs here from Peter Kennedy’s collection Folk Songs of Britain and Ireland. It also shows off the pair’s winning combination of practicality and experimentation: the percussion in the song was created by recording the sounds of actual locks and bolts.
Henry generally leaves most of the singing to Martin, but he takes the lead vocal on The Mountain Stream, and he proves a more than capable vocalist, brilliantly accompanying himself on dobro, on a song that is by turns warm and wild. Another song with a wild heart is Queen Amongst The Heather, which grows from a spare arrangement, foregrounding Martin’s singing, to a vehicle for Henry’s weird and wonderful ‘beatbox harmonica’ technique. The duo are masters at splicing traditional and contemporary methods, and on Come Write Me Down the influences of electronica can be discerned, augmenting a simple but beautiful melody.
They are also brilliant at giving a song just the right amount of space, and their timing – both musically and vocally is impeccable. The Deluded Lover sees harmonised vocals trade places with a minimal, bluesy electric guitar, and the result is sweet and haunting. Bird In A Cage flickers and flits from verse to verse, while the improvised solos are a taste of how impressive these two are as live performers (and a reminder of what we are all currently missing).
Closing track The Seeds Of Love was the first song collected by Cecil Sharp, and as such holds a place as a kind of ur-text for English traditional music. It stands to reason, given the admirably forward-thinking way in which Martin and Henry make music, that it provides one of the album’s most experimental moments, full of wordless backing vocals that mimic the sounds of birds and insects, the quiet hum of the outdoors, an English arcadia that is currently beyond the reach of many. It ends on the most positive of notes, with the words ‘give it time it will rise again,’ and that positivity sums up Edgelarks’ music as a whole and this superb album in particular: resolutely optimistic, brilliantly played and a joy from start to finish.
Pre-Order Henry Martin vi Bandcamp: https://philliphenryhannahmartin.bandcamp.com/