Eliza Carthy & The Restitution
Queen Of The Whirl
Hem Hem Records
11 November 2022 (CD/LP) – Pre-order
It is high time I adjusted the place Eliza Carthy occupies in my head; as a long-time folk fan, she slightly inaccurately remains the daughter of folk royalty flying the flag for the new breed. And yet, here we are welcoming a celebration of Eliza’s thirty years working as a professional musician with a release that punches far beyond the ambition of a mere ‘best of’ collection. These are new recordings, for starters, re-imaginings of selected titles from across her many solo and collaborative releases. And far from curating a dry, predictable selection, she has instead reached out to her Twitter community whose song suggestions spanning the decades have resulted in a delightfully diverse collection, a mixture of the crowd-pleasing and the memorable curios. Reworking everything from scratch as a brand-new project gives the album a fine unified flow when experienced as a whole. This is the sound of the artist as she is now, capturing a bountiful snapshot of her relationship with her own work as she feels it today, and today Eliza sounds particularly switched on.
Recorded alongside her superb band The Restitution, ‘Queen Of The Whirl’ revisits this material with all the experience Eliza Carthy has picked up over 30 years of folk evolution and collaboration. Originally from 1998’s breakthrough ‘Red Rice’, ‘The Snow It Melts The Soonest’ is recast as a heavy, brooding folk-rock lament; drenched in funereal organ, it is aglow with gothic splendour, where before you felt the chill, now you see the blood red sky. A similar unfastening of darker elements happens on other tracks too, such as ‘The Company Of Men;’ once that opening line about blow jobs was cushioned rather by the strings and harps that surrounded it, now the arrangement loses that sugar coating and the effect is a whole lot more lived-in. On ‘My Father’s Mansions,’ which Eliza first sang with Billy Bragg on 1998’s songs of Pete Seeger collection, The Restitution are positively demolishing this mansion with some seriously earth-shaking filigrees of electrical onslaught; there is real drama in this musicianship.
I accept this is how it should be with a retrospective, but I’ll say it anyway, there are no weak spots or lulls here. From the frugging, pub-rocking delight of ‘Stumbling On,’ the true story told in ‘Blood On My Boots’ and the dance grooves bedrock on the joint tribute to both Calypso legend Mighty Sparrow and her mother Norma Waterson, ‘Good Morning Mr Walker,’ this is all top-drawer. Ultimately, with Eliza, just as it was with her mother, the element that fires listeners up the most is that voice. As far as natural-born instruments go, it is one of the best and wow, does she know how to use it. Eliza Carthy’s voice does not just merely grab your attention. No, it is far more commanding than that. This is a voice that vehemently grabs you by the ear lobes, lifting you off the floor, taking down your name and making it abundantly clear that questions will be asked on the way out, so you had better be paying attention. Eliza sums up her relationship with her own music most succinctly in the liner notes when she says it is “about stories and connection and love and bollocks.” It is indeed, but fantastically so. Buy this album if you already know her work, buy it if you are new, then enjoy a deep dig backwards; either way, she should be an inspiration to all; that famous name is in safe hands and continues to move this music forward.
Queen of the Whirl is out on 11 November 2022 (CD/LP) – Pre-order here
Eliza Carthy & The Restitution on tour 2022
Tickets: https://eliza-carthy.com/gigs
23 Nov 2022 – MASHAM TOWN HALL, MASHAM
24 Nov 2022 – DISS CORN HALL, DISS
25 Nov 2022 – HOWARD ASSEMBLY ROOMS, LEEDS
26 Nov 2022 – LUDLOW ASSEMBLY ROOMS, LUDLOW
27 Nov 2022 – GREYSTONES, SHEFFIELD
28 Nov 2022 – THE GLEE CLUB, BIRMINGHAM
29 Nov 2022 – BRIGHTON KOMEDIA, BRIGHTON
30 Nov 2022 – GLEE CLUB, CARDIFF
01 Dec 2022 – TURNER SIMS CONCERT HALL, SOUTHAMPTON
02 Dec 2022 – TOWNHALL, CHIPPING NORTON
03 Dec 2022 – SAGE GATESHEAD, GATESHEAD
04 Dec 2022 – BAND ON THE WALL, MANCHESTER
05 Dec 2022 – JUNCTION 1, CAMBRIDGE
04 Feb 2023 – BARBICAN, LONDON (Tickets)