Ben Calvert
Inside Outside
Bohemian Jukebox
7 October 2022
Ben Calvert is described in these pages as a sort of male Vashti Bunyan, albeit filtered through echoes of early Morrissey and Nick Drake. Inside Out is the Stafford-based singer’s first release of the year, a four-track post-folk EP that, its title taken from a paradoxical line in Mike Leigh’s Naked, touches on mysticism, religious figures, icons and symbols. It opens with the watery dark pastoral feel of the strummed Four Daughters, Calvert’s echoey vocals calling to mind Roy Harper on a song that speaks to both loss (“my third daughter should be nineteen”) and the care for an unborn child, though the lyrics are laced with intimations of dread (“A hook to pull the devils out/The medicine of Jesus/A jab to keep you older/Procedures stop the breathing”) with its image of “the nurses and the needles”.
Again hollow and mournful, opening to what’s a possible King Lear-inspired reference (“Blow wind! Howl”), The Dark And Jagged Mirrors Of The Lord concerns indoctrination and the consequences of following blindly (“You worship your god with fire, your god will burn you with fire/Too dumb to see you’re the harm, you fold while holding cards/The father’s grief and desire has jumped a fair child’s mind”) as “Soaring birds swoop down to pick and to peck at you/Fall to your knees, deliver your speech to the world”.
Calvert again summons uneasy images on the bass-heavy drone-like The Outsider (where he sounds like a sepulchral Robin Williamson) as he intones, “The blood red sun burns the sky/Gunmetal sky that hangs heavy above you/Feathers fly by from the ones that are hunting you” while venturing into the realms of the surreal in “Unlucky is the man who lives in doorways who grows coins from hands…Ray is wearing masks because he’s lovely/He’s bringing his candles today/He’s waiting for quarter past three”, though there’s a wry observation in the line “If only people spoke of what they had done, instead of what they hoped they would do/There would be so much silence”.
Finally comes The Trap, which, set to a repeated guitar pattern like a troubled mantra, opens like a reassuring lullaby (“Sleep well, my lovely lonely one …Don’t believe the end of the world will come tonight”) and hope for a better world (“I want good things to happen to good and bad people”) before giving way to images of darkness and disenfranchisement (“In the depth of the darkest winter’s night/I walk to work/The homeless people they play upon my mind”) and visions of impending doom (“The clocks are already to slow/The minute hand just wants to stop to escape the trap/The fox is already too slow/The hounds they’re already to go/They’re in and out of the trap”). For those inclined to uneasy listening in the eerie hours betwixt the shades of dusk and the faint gloom of dawn, Calvert continues to prove to be an intoxicating singular talent.
Inside Out is out now and available via Bandcamp.