Storm the Palace‘s La Bête Blanche is folk at heart, but it pilfers in turn from the aligned spheres of pop, punk and rock, each chorus more gleeful than the last, as it takes aim at anything joyless, priggish or conventional. Where it reaches its howling, pantomime-angry zenith – as on The Witch Bitch – the energy and relish in the performance is palpable: lyrics like ‘She’s a witch, she’s a witch, from her tail to her tits’ deserve a certain theatrical flair, and Storm the Palace don’t disappoint. This is a band clearly honed by live performance, and these songs are both intimate and stirring, as if recorded not only with a live audience in mind but with a clear idea of what that audience might want from this particular brand of music. The balladic sweep of Black Swans and Dragon Kings, the emotionally charged chord changes of Time of the Bindweed: it all seems calculated (or perhaps intuited is a better word; there is nothing of the coldness of calculation in this always involving music) to elicit a visceral, human response.
Elsewhere there are subtler moments where the band veer into genuinely spooky freak folk, atmospheric field recordings and impressively detailed spoken narratives, and these are, if anything, even more impressive than the rollicking, flat-out pop-rockers. The short opening track, The Bramble Song, ushered in on birdsong, sets an Angela Carter-esque vignette in a hauntologically-inclined inversion of Merrie England and touches it up with baroque flourishes. There are itchy fiddles and cultish, drum-led chants (the brilliant Born On the Other Side), poetic accumulations of detail (the spoken-word Crow Guardians of the Vortex), deeply personal rewrites of Scottish myths (The Selkie of Wardie Bay), the earthy twang and airy echo of Some of the Beasts and Birds We Saw, with its micro-eruptions of distorted guitar and voice.
The bulk of the songwriting is taken on by Sophie Dodds, with some help from Willa Bews, while fiddler Jon Bews contributes a pair of instrumentals, but this genuinely feels like a full-band effort, with Albero Bravo’s skilful and varied drumming often coming to the fore along with Reuben Taylor, who plays keys of all kinds. The stately, filmic mini-epic Happily Ever After is a case in point, with various band members providing vocals, both spoken and sung over Taylor’s pretty but discomfiting harpsichord. If the music is varied, then the lyrics are doubly diverse, ranging from brief character studies of infamous female murderers (She Knows) to a tribute to Hedy Lamarr’s scientific career (Frequencies To Victory), from an itemisation of bizarre dreams (the gently psychedelic Dream House) to a glam-folk-rock re-reading of a Viking legend (Ragnar).
If the sheer breadth of reference and influence seems like it might be overwhelming, then rest assured there is an openness to La Bête Blanche, a delight in music’s power to elucidate complex ideas simply, and with good humour, that makes it anything but a difficult listen. Whatever genre they happen to be joyously ransacking, Storm the Palace are masters of the art of communicating.
Order La Bête Blanche via Bandcamp: https://stormthepalace.bandcamp.com/album/la-b-te-blanche
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