The Memory Band – Colours
Independent (TMB06) – Out Now
Where does a band end and a collective begin? The Memory Band are on their sixth album now, and each one has had a different line-up – and a subtly different feel – to its predecessor. The one constant – the pole star in the Memory Band firmament – seems to be singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer Stephen Cracknell. While his large and varied cast of collaborators might suggest a certain looseness, in reality, the band dynamic is apparent. This is perhaps due to the quality of the musicians, many of whom are well-known on the folk circuit and beyond and are able to slot in with practised ease.
Musically, Cracknell has always occupied folk’s hauntological hinterlands, and the songs on Colours are no exception. The majority are originals, but there is a sprinkling of traditional material and a spooky, sexy cover of Paul Giovanni’s Gently Johnny (from The Wicker Man soundtrack, which the band has previously toured in its entirety). Even on the traditional songs, there is a sense of the uncanny, as if what you are hearing exists between history, memory and imagination. Opener The Sweet Primroses, for example, makes use of a three-part brass section (Alex Bonney on trumpet, Dee Byrne on alto sax, Howard Cottle on tenor sax) to foreground a melody that seems instantly recognisable and just a little off-kilter, a nostalgic dream tempered by Fred Thomas’s slightly eerie, slightly lounge-y electric piano.
Bells is a partial recasting of William Blake’s Auguries Of Innocence. It’s not the first time this poem has been set to music (the Doors did it most famously in End Of The Night), but Lisa Bec’s deceptively simple recorder and Tom Page’s scratchy percussion means it is the most interesting. Albion’s Daughter, an instrumental composed by Cracknell, provides another showcase for the woozy horns (and for Olie Brice’s skills as an arranger). It sounds like the backdrop to a pagan ritual that is apparently innocent but could turn nasty.
Nancy Wallace takes an impressive lead vocal spot on the well-known folk song The Trees They Do Grow High, its melancholic subject matter (loss of innocence, early death, grief) given an even more haunting aspect by Fred Thomas’s pining reed organ and piano. The other traditional track, the instrumental Equinox, once again relies on Thomas’s keys and Brice’s double bass. Cracknell himself sticks mainly to acoustic guitar (with a bit of synth and piano thrown in across the album), a move which might seem to keep him in the background. Still, his guiding hand is clear throughout, in the album’s muted oddness, its open-armed celebration of England’s weirdness. This is particularly evident on the title track when he moves away from what we might call traditional instrumentation and plays a Zimbabwean mbira with lovely, strange and quite hypnotic results.
There are moments of darkness, like the drone-infused Nightwalk (complete with spooky, impressionistic double bass and recorded birdsong), but overall the mood is light. It is the quality of that light – hazy, limpid, or sometimes overexposed – that gives Colours its unique, magical feel. Voices, for example, interweaves a number of spoken pieces (from guests including Lisa Knapp, Liam Bailey and John Andrews) with such skill that it is like stumbling across a secret radio signal: human communications, sure, but from the very edge of consciousness. Similarly, the whole of Cursus is performed by Sam Ewens on trumpet and flugelhorn, and the result is like the fanfare from some imaginary but extremely colourful pageant. Closing track A Wooded World takes the jazzy elements of the horns to their logical extreme, only the logic here is ever so slightly twisted.
You never quite know where you are with The Memory Band – it is like the musical equivalent of the first few seconds of wakefulness after a particularly vivid dream. But this is exactly what makes them so special and so interesting. They exist on the margins of folk and electronica, but they manage to bring a touch of the sublime to these liminal states.
Order via Bandcamp: https://thememoryband.bandcamp.com/