Oka Vanga – Oka Vanga
Crazy Bird Records (CraBD006) – 26 March 2021
Their name a play on Okavango, a river delta in Botswana, South African born sepia-dusty toned vocalist and songwriter Angela Meyer and Londoner guitarist William Cox met at an open mic night and soon became a personal and professional partnership. This is Oka Vanga‘s third album, a fusion of Americana and British folk, and has them joined by ubiquitous double bassist John Parker and in-demand fiddle player Patsy Reid.
It opens in exuberantly joyful fashion with the folksy and hillbilly bounce of the cello chugging and fiddle flowing Beneath The Apple Tree, influenced by the ancient folklore of apple trees and their association with love and health and written for the aptly named Cox whilst recovering from surgery. Turning to a different tree (often planted near churches to fend off evil), those folk roots bubble up again on the tribal stomp rhythm of Bows Of Yew with its echoey whistling and the medicine show call to “hold your bows a little higher or the devil will find you”. Apparently nodding to a local legend about Hertfordshire dragon-slayer Piers Shonks being buried within the walls of St. Mary’s church in Brent Pelham, their young daughter Daisy also gets to make her musical debut on tambourine.
The mark of any Appalachian influenced album worth its salt is how long you can go without a song about alcohol, so good news that just three tracks in and we get the frisky mandolin and double bass coloured bluesy Whisky For Sorrow, shifting into social commentary territory for Seek And Run (“from the tide”) again with a tribal rhythmic pulse, here couched with a Celtic skirl. Turning to English traditional roots, Tenpenny Bit & The Crooked Crow is the first of two instrumental co-writes, this, bringing together the initial Irish jig with their own tune, summoning medieval shades and played out with mandolin lead, the other, a pairing of the traditional Blackthorn Stick & Atholl Highlanders, the former a sword dance from the northeast and, Reid taking the spotlight, the latter of self-explanatory provenance.
The longest track at just over four minutes, Johanna is Meyer’s Americana-tinged song of a mother’s love, a tribute to her late grandmother inspired by stories her father told her of how she’d unpick old jumpers and re-use the wool to make intricate quilts. They remain on old-time acoustic country for the lyrically uplifting Blue Sky In Our Veins that, with its mandolin and violin, uses colours as representing pain, loss and hope.
By way of a stylistic tangent, returning to natural imagery, the penultimate Bluebird is a jazzier acoustic affair that speaks of resilience and determination, the album ending on another ornithological note with their counted in a live recording of the trad chestnut The Cuckoo, its echoey sound and distanced vocals rumbling along on Cox’s mandolin riffs, “We’ve got stars above our head and stars beneath our feet”, sings Meyer, a fine summation of this stellar album.
Oka Vanga is out now. Order via Bandcamp: https://okavanga.bandcamp.com/album/oka-vanga