Stick in the Wheel – Tonebeds for Poetry
Independent – 2021
Stick In The Wheel do things differently. That might sound like a trite statement, but it is entirely appropriate in the case of the London-based duo. On 2020’s brilliant Hold Fast, they married forgotten dialects to thoroughly modern recording techniques, sang about recent internet memes and brought a DIY punk ethos to 10th-century religious history.
Tonebeds For Poetry casts the net even wider if that’s possible. Here the form, as well as the content, is unexpected: the album is presented as a mixtape. In this way, they toy with the idea of musical lineages. It’s not so much a renunciation of pigeonholes as a celebration of otherness. They recognise that the vernacular of the city and of contemporary urban musical forms is as valid a tradition as any of the more widely accepted varieties of folk music.
And the content backs up the form: a shimmer of Ian Carter’s guitar and Nicola Kearey’s autotune-enhanced, part-spoken vocals position the opener Long The Day somewhere between Flotus-era Lambchop and the hypnagogic avant-pop of Dean Blunt. The Cuckoo – a well-known traditional song – is given a trippy, dubby makeover, while The Seafarer is bleak poetry set over minimal beats.
In general terms, this is an urban album, but more specifically, it is an album that has grown out of the dark corners of London. Even in the tracks that don’t feature Kearey’s vocals, it captures the political and ecological anxiety pent up within the capital: the liminal, uneasy hum of PRSN, the mechanical throbs of Stroud Green Sentinel and the squealing electronics of Carter’s Peal. Ruins starts life with an X-Files/Twin Peaks synth line before becoming a very modern ode to decay, and Blind Beggar takes an ostensibly traditional song and lines its pockets with Broadcast-style psych glitch pop and library music. It’s all about the juxtapositions, and in Kearey and Carter’s hands, they are consistently surprising and never less than thrilling.
The most startling and ambitious moments come towards the end of the album with The Devil’s Nag, which bridges four centuries of dance music with wholly entertaining results, and Wierds Broke It, a cracked slab of grunge that sounds like Sonic Youth if they’d been formed in the East End (and invented autotune).
Combinations of sound that are unexpected and completely unique, discordant interludes and ragged-edged drones: these aren’t the things you might expect to find on a folk album. But we live in accelerated times, and if music doesn’t change, it will die out. No one recognises that fact quite so keenly as Stick In The Wheel, who continue to be one of the most groundbreaking and unpredictable acts in any of the countless genres they move between.
Stick in the Wheel Shop | Bandcamp
https://www.stickinthewheel.com