Elly Lucas’ In The Quiet Of The Waiting is a small jewel of an EP with an understated sparkle and a deceptive emotional depth.
Elly Lucas approaches folk music from multiple directions at once. Her violin playing is influenced by classical music; her songs are indebted to the DIY aesthetic of the more experimental side of contemporary folk; the settings are notable for their use of space and restraint and often utilise field recordings. And her singing has an unaffected clarity that places her in the same lineage as Anne Briggs or Lisa Knapp.
How Can I Keep From Singing is a perfect example: Lucas’s voice, accompanied only by birdsong, turns a 150-year-old hymn into a secular rallying cry, an appeal to positivity at a time when positivity is in short supply. It comes as no surprise to learn that this EP was recorded during the 2020 lockdowns: its opening song exults in the face of tumult, tempest and incarceration. The primacy of the human spirit comes to the fore: it is a celebration of life through song but also a very realistic admission that times are tough.
When The Boat Comes In takes the simplest and most familiar of folk songs and imbues it with a quiet tension, the plucked and bowed strings playing off against one another, while the instrumental Irwin’s Orange splices together two fiddle tunes – Planxty Irwin and Orange In Bloom – and brings a sweetness and tenderness to each. Lucas is open about the place of grief, loss and memory in her music, and the way she interprets these tunes allows the melancholic side of the fiddle to thrive alongside (rather than at the expense of) its more overtly joyful nature.
Intriguingly, the last two songs on her EP, In The Quiet Of The Waiting, share an invertebrate theme. Something’s in the Kitchen is a smartly-observed original about spending lockdown with a spider. The way Lucas uses the tiniest of subjects to illuminate a much bigger picture is striking: it’s a technique that goes back at least as far as John Donne, but she does it in a manner that sounds fresh and relevant. She is an accomplished photographer by trade and brings a strong visual element to this song: it is presented like a static tableau, a slice of action or inaction from a strange and tense period of time.
It’s followed by a cover of The Moth by the criminally underrated Anne Lister. Lucas’s multi-tracked vocals are unaccompanied for the first verse before the song takes tentatively to the air with a subtle and intricate arrangement of strings, plucked and bowed. Like the rest of this small jewel of an EP, it has an understated sparkle and a deceptive emotional depth.
Order In The Quiet Of The Waiting via Bandcamp: https://ellylucas.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-quiet-of-the-waiting