Sally Anne Morgan – Cups
Thrill Jockey – 12 November 2021
For her second solo release, Sally Anne Morgan has eschewed the folk and pop structures of her debut, last year’s Thread, for a much looser and organic approach; indeed, sometimes the music on Cups comes across like threads of sound, barely knitted together. The effect is one that is as freeing and unexpected as a walk out in nature.
The first single, Prune, takes a skeletal banjo tune, as uniform as raindrops on leaves and adds slow half bows of the fiddle to create a minimalist tapestry of flickers and glimmers. There is clearly an improvised bent throughout Cups that is direct, clear and quite magical; it had me at the first listen.
Hori Hori feels more composed than Prune and the opening song Night Window, which uses disparate fiddle notes and scattered glockenspiel to evoke the endless nocturnal movers. Instead, she uses plucked guitar and a few banjo notes to create a more linear and progressive tune; the fiddle is integral again, with longer and more developed notes forming the core of the piece.
Pythagoras brings in shards of percussion and the eerie rattle of a wooden frog, working alongside disjointed violin and banjo to paint a less contented image, while Through the Threshold uses a traditional fiddle tune to beautifully realise a sense of purity and optimism. Even better is closing track Angeline, in which gradually more urgent guitar and banjo play along with slower and lower fiddle strokes to create a sense of complex intensity.
In many ways, the delicately layered acoustic sounds of Cups brought to mind bandmate Sarah Louise‘s electric guitar-based Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars album, in that it uses sound fragments and less obvious musical structures, but Cups, of course, contains more rustic and wooden sounding music, less psychedelic than that found on Nighttime Birds.
It is a stunner; conventional patterns are used sparingly alongside floating notes and looped arrangements to result in music that challenges and wonderfully brings to mind the magic and intricacies of nature and rural life. This is a highly creative, rich and detailed piece of work.
Order Cups via Thrill Jockey | Bandcamp
Sally Anne Morgan also recently made a playlist of haunting Appalachian folk for the BBC Freakzone Playlist which you can listen to here (available until mid-October only so don’t hesitate in listening).
Photo Credit: Katrina Ohstrom