Henry Parker: Lammas Fair
Cup & Ring – 5 November 2021
There is a lush folk-rock sound from the opening bars of Henry Parker’s Lammas Fair – cymbal splashes and an evocative guitar that splits the difference between Richard Thompson and the Byrds. But while the sounds betray a certain nostalgia for the late-60s golden age, the songwriting is all Parker’s own. His primary preoccupation is with a sense of place, and he is succinct and descriptive in equal measure. The album’s opening line – ‘The wind blows through the Hitching Stone’ shows how adept he is at setting a scene. It places the listener in the midst of a particular landscape from the off. Still, it also conveys the mystery of that landscape (the Hitching Stone, near Parker’s home in Yorkshire, is a glacial erratic, a geological feature that both belongs and doesn’t belong).
While songwriters of previous generations have often used the folk idiom to explore strange and beautiful landscapes, contemporary artists are, by necessity, more acutely aware of how these landscapes are being altered or erased by human actions. Parker is at the forefront of this loose ecologically-aware movement. The title track of his previous album, 2019’s Silent Spring, is a homage to Rachel Carson’s influential book of the same name about the damage caused to the environment by synthetic pesticides. The songs on Lammas Fair are more abstract in their approach, but each celebrates, in its own way, a facet of Parker’s relationship with nature. Return To The Sky resembles early Incredible String Band, employing a spare kind of poetry and an atmospheric, eastern-inflected melody to return to Silent Spring’s themes: ‘The winter never came/And summer cried for rain/But seas are rising faster by the year.’
Travelling For A Living cleverly compares the lot of itinerant workers of the past and today’s immigrant workforce. Parker is never afraid to shy away from difficult and emotive issues, describing the way we treat certain minority groups as ‘a national shame.’ His approach to the present and past is evenhanded and unromanticised, but he is still capable of coaxing out the hazy beauty of old rituals and the movement of the seasons.
That hazy beauty carries over into the music – the aforementioned muted cymbals (from drummer Louis Berthoud), the light touches of Fender Rhodes on Fools Gold (Theo Travis) and Parker’s own sumptuous guitar playing which, on acoustic pieces like the beautiful instrumental Blackthorn, recalls John Renbourn or Martin Carthy (with whom he shares a penchant for unusual and distinctive tunings) as well as contemporaries like Toby Hay.
His forays into traditional material – Death And The Lady and The Brisk Lad are equally alluring. The former, backed by Richard Curran’s violin and cello, is a haunting interpretation, while the latter is a brooding folk-rocker cut through by dark swathes of percussion and culminating in a bracing wave of electric guitar. He provides a particularly effective lead-in to the deceptively simple closing track, Coming Of The Spring, which adds e-bow and bowed cymbal (techniques usually more at home in free improvisation) to the already potent interplay of acoustic and electric guitars.
Another highlight is Nine Herbs Charm, which is like a pagan, eco-conscious alternative to putting the lime in the coconut and is augmented by Theo Travis’ flute, which isn’t too far away from Harold McNair’s work with Donovan. Travis switches to piano to apply minimal touches to the slow-burning Given Time, an invitation to take a step back from the clatter and clutter of modern life and, in particular, the alienating aspects of technology. It’s a message that sums up Lammas Fair, an album full of old wisdom and new beginnings, deeply rooted in the wild landscape of northern England but ultimately outward-looking and welcoming.
Lammas Fair is released 5th November 2021 on Cup and Ring.
Pre-Order it today (Digital/CD/Vinyl – including vinyl limited Edition): https://henryparker.bandcamp.com/album/lammas-fair
More on Henry Parker:
Website: https://henryparkermusic.co.uk/
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