Elspeth Anne
Mercy Me
Self Released
25 November 2022
There has been a recent and welcome upsurge of folk artists keen to embrace a more experimental approach to their practice. In the last couple of months, albums by Burd Ellen, Stick In The Wheel and One Leg One Eye (Lankum’s Ian Lynch) have employed elements of modern composition, drone, dark ambient or punkish DIY to create eerie atmospheres in songs that remain historically engaged and emotionally pertinent. Elspeth Anne, a singer-songwriter based on the Welsh Borders, is another name to add to that impressive list. Mercy Me is her third album, and the subjects of many of its songs come from a series of dreams and nightmares prompted by the covid lockdown.
Eight of the ten songs here are originals, and Elspeth proves to be a writer in complete control of her craft, even as the songs seem to strain at the confines of genre. On opener Belt, her idiosyncratic ear for melody and structure is in full view – a weird-folk verse crashes into a punky, poppy chorus before the song veers into forceful Americana and then back through the gears. It’s anchored all the while by collaborator Alfie Gidley’s subtly skewed banjo. The title track builds multi-tracked vocals onto an insistent drone to haunting effect: everything feels slightly off-kilter, giddy, almost a bit narcotic. She captures the musical language of dreams perfectly. The apparent simplicity of songs like Coward only serves to emphasise their melodic and emotional power.
Moments of conventional beauty are linked by patches of strangeness, as on Hell Is Blossoming, where an initially sweet run of piano notes blooms into something more sinister. Elspeth writes from a queer standpoint, and her understanding of otherness seems to run deep. Turn, Worm has something of Angela Carter’s strange fables about it, only more hallucinatory and, if anything, more visceral. Here the drone becomes the musical equivalent of moist earth, inviting but perhaps stained with blood. Even the album’s lightest moments – the indie-pop strum of With The Thaw I Am Renewed, for instance – have more than their fair share of dark twists. Elspeth is an admirer of Aldous Harding, and she shares with the New Zealander a penchant for songs that are as tempting and as dangerous as poison apples.
The two traditional songs here are no less impressive. When I Was A Young Girl shimmers and builds, imbuing a tale of regret and death with determination and eldritch power, while the Canadian folk song Peggy Gordon grows from field recordings and spooked background sounds via a sea-washed drone to become one of Elspeth’s finest vocal performances, her voice both restrained and wild, and always full of longing. It’s a song that has been recorded by everyone from the Dransfields to the Melvins, but it can rarely have sounded as moving or as complete as it does here.
While this kind of experimental music is sometimes (and often wrongly) dismissed as lacking heart, of valuing the process over the result, such an accusation could never be levelled at Mercy Me. It is an album full of ideas, but more importantly, full of feeling, a raw, moving triumph.
The CD comes in a full-colour printed card digifile case with a 12-page booklet featuring lyrics and original artwork by Elspeth.