Firefay and Alison O’Donnell – The Travels of Janus
Independent – Out Now (Digital)
The estate of folk is both long and wide, sprawling over sunny meadows and murky woodland, capable of nurturing many an outcrop, blooming away from the vine. And it is in those murky woodlands where this unexpected gem resides, as potent a force as anything out there in plain sight. Those in the know will know, this release being largely unheralded, but the rest of you, take a torch and explore.
Sixteen at the time, Alison O’Donnell made her debut with Irish outliers Mellow Candle in 1972. Their solitary album, ‘Swaddling Songs’, dropped, to minimal acclaim at the time, not helped by Decca’s evasive promotional budgeting. Over the years the album has built a subsequent exponential reverence with the orginal vinyl fetching over £3,000 on Discogs. Never knowingly making a right step, with less a career, more a compulsion, she has continued to plough her own oblique farrow, playing in bands such as Flibbertibbet and Earthling and then in the 2000s playing on a number of other projects, including ‘The Fabric of Folk’ by The Owl Service and United Bible Studies ‘The Jonah’ with whom she has been involved with since.
She has a track record with Firefay, the pairing producing an earlier record, ‘Anointed Queen’, in 2014 (reviewed here). Firefay describe themselves as folk-noir and meld a spiky mix of an electric trad influence with French chanson, with abundant trumpet and cello, and of a decidedly pagan bent. Labels usually distract but file somewhere between wyrd and psych-folk. O’Donnell’s defiantly and gloriously untutored voice fits their thorny hedge of sound, the pairing stronger than the parts.
So to business, and the project kicks off with ‘Coming to London of Wily Will’, calling card already demonstrating the rustic trug of Shirley Collins and the Albion Band rather than the polished reproductions of June Tabor and Oysterband. A complex underplay of guitar and droning strings provide a sturdy foundation for O’Donnell’s soaring vocal, the drums of Neil Huxtable a glorious clatter. ‘Between Two African Rivers’ then produces a swivel of style, the distinctly jazz-tinged saxophone of Sue Lynch introducing what seems to be an instrumental, ahead of O’Donnell breaking in, after a minute, in an altogether mellower mood, the picked guitar of Adam Bulewski, de facto bandleader, songwriter, with McDonnell, and musical arranger, adding a tonal continuity.
All change, again, into the effects laden ‘Cosmic Harlequin’, showing, should there be any doubt, that this combination is no one-trick pony. Hints of new romanticism here render again the purposelessness of genre-typing, with retro burbles of an analogue synth. Give it a couple of listens and you’ll be hooked.
O’Donnell accompanies herself on omnichord for the mournful ‘Blue Eyed Girl in Belsize Park’, with a lonely cello weaving around the vocal, courtesy Fraser Parry, extending into an instrumental coda of some beauty.
Wondering quite what can they possibly produce next, ‘My Lady’s Dompe’, one of two live tracks, offers a spritely gallic gavotte, with the first full appearance of the trumpet, high in the mix and triumphant. An almost instrumental, following the trumpet and some renaissance keyboard, it has the bass walking up and down through a middle section, before surf guitars break back through, the trumpet then rejoining, this time in a mariachi mood, trading licks with, finally, the effervescent wordless scat from O’Donnell; an exhilarating performance.
A burst of rattling and ratcheting percussion introduces ‘Child of Knife and Fist’, which becomes progressively tribal, ending just as you begin to get it. Equally odd, and just as hypnotic, is ‘Shining Crystal Meadow’, another mystic experience of repeated notes and more ghostly synth and sitar-like FX. Add a third track, the almost but not quite motorik of ‘A Cyclical Thing’, driven by sawing cellos, and these are the most out-there offerings here, both psychedelic with a whiff of hauntology about them.
By contrast, ‘Rocks on a Beaten Path’ offers a Germanic sounding melody, over picked guitar and cellos, with a second melody counterpointing across it, the sound of skipped heartbeats, aptly, as that is what it is about. That teutonic feel is amplified into the second live track, a cover of Nico’s ‘Frozen Warnings’. This is actually warmer in tone than both the original and the lyric, the backing a controlled maelstrom of drone and feedback. With a sudden kick into gear for the final two thirds, plucked guitar and trumpet over the chug of the cello, O’Donnell is at her most anguished, the beseeching wail of a crone. The longest, and last, track, at eight minutes, I can imagine it lasting much longer and wanting it to.
Altogether an intriguingly powerful set with a striking use of instrumentation, where the voice is both integral and additional to the multi-faceted palette of tonal timbres. Mainstream they are certainly not, but put away that torch, they play as well by day as by night. Embrace the noir.
Bandcamp: https://firefay.bandcamp.com/album/the-travels-of-janus