Shirley Collins – Crowlink EP
Domino Records – 2021
Traditional music’s eternal paradox is that it is always changing. It has to change in order to stay alive. As one of folk’s true pioneers since the late 1950s, Shirley Collins has seen – and indeed played a part in bringing about – many of these changes. She has earned the right to do things differently, and Crowlink, her latest EP, is perhaps her most experimental and exploratory work to date.
The final song on last year’s stunning Heart’s Ease album was also called Crowlink – after a hamlet in Collins’ home county of Sussex – and the five tracks here take their cue from that record’s hauntingly beautiful endpoint, with its sound of thunder and birdsong. But these are more than reflections or riffs on a theme. Each song is perfectly self-contained and the EP as a whole is a small wonder. Opener Across The Field is a spoken snippet, less than half a minute long, which somehow encapsulates Collins’ past and present as a recording artist. Listeners may recognise some of the words from Just As The Tide Was Flowing, a song she previously recorded as a solo artist and with the Albion Country Band. Here, with its field recording of birdsong, it becomes a kind of mantra, an almost magical link with a creative spirit that seems to exist outside the passage of time.
The field recordings – provided by collaborator Matthew Shaw, who also produced the record – are important here. They help to pin the music to a particular place – in this case, rural Sussex – but they are also vital to that timeless quality Collins has perfected. On the highly textural instrumental At Break Of Day, Shaw’s synths take centre stage. It is a melting pot of dreamy new-age sonics and ancient, almost religious mysticism, but it is always anchored in the earth. Collins’ presence on this track is essentially a spiritual one: she is a presiding figure, benign but never banal, whose overarching vision is always discernible.
At the EP’s centre is Through All Eternity, a gentle hymn (a reworking, in fact, of the American song What Wondrous Love Is This) that speaks of music’s power to live on beyond death. Collins imbues it with a new significance – it shakes off its narrow Christian meaning and becomes something wilder and more pagan, a kind of cosmological pact with the afterlife. Her voice is both earthy and otherworldly, like a profane ornament in a church, deeply marked but honed with evident skill. My Sailor Boy sees her set this incredible voice against a windswept, wave-crashed soundscape, with results that are truly beautiful and genuinely moving.
These songs are simultaneously ancient and new: often, an old folk song will be given a new name, but when that happens here, it is always something more subtle and interesting than a straight update of a standard song. There is something slightly – thrillingly – awry in the delivery or in the way the vocal scratches against the field recordings that underpin it. These songs exist on the edge of song, looking out at something more natural, more wild, less human. Closing track The Briar And The Rose – ostensibly a version of the well-known Barbara Allen – manages to convey something sinister in the nature of human interactions, but also something more hopeful. Here she is accompanied by Ossian Brown’s hurdy-gurdy, providing an unusual flourish to a release that can be elementally charged or unnervingly intimate, but is never less than exquisite.
Stream Crowlink: https://smarturl.it/CrowlinkEP