Villages
Dark Island
Sonic Records
17 February 2023
Hailing from Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Villages are a folk rock quartet lining up as Matt Ellis, Travis Ellis, Jon Pearo and Archie Rankin. Their new album, Dark Island, is produced by JUNO-winning composer Joshua Van Tassel and was recorded live off the floor with no song having more than three takes, capturing the energy of their stage shows. Thematically, while it might be seen as a bit of a downer, the title (taken from a traditional Scottish folk song) is essentially a metaphor for death and looking back to take stock of your life; musically, it is a decidedly upbeat and celebratory affair. The album opens with birds chirping before Ellis echoingly sings “good morning” before Wearing Through the Pine launches into a Celtic-tinged shimmer and jangle with lyrics returning to childhood (“I’ve no longer hair a blonder than the sun/I’m wearing through the pine/Today my best friend’s turning six, another five before he’s licked”) as it boards the train to the life ahead. They’re in no less ebullient mood with the mid-tempo folk-pop feel of Love Will Live On where, while times are hard (“I’m too poor to be buying this round”), the prospect of finding a piece of land where the couple in the lyrics can “make love in the fields of heather wild/And build a quiet life, on an island in the Maritimes” holds out hope and even if they’re “Still in the fog somehow/It’s the best thought we ever had”.
The vocals go for the high notes and whoops, and the notes cascade on the infectious folksy pop Easy When You Know How, a buoyantly upbeat number about being caught up in the joy of life (“There ain’t nothing that I can’t do under blue skies bluer than a blue jay’s blue/The waterfall casts inviting hues, on the breath of a sultry day/I duck down to the cave beneath the falls/Where the thousand year old paintings tell the meaning of it all/Life is work but that ain’t all/It’s just the moral of the deal”) and facing death with a swagger (“When pale death’s upon my doorway/I’ll waltz upon the pulpit toward the final soirée”).
It seems nothing dampens their spirits; the strummed Celtic-toned march beat Dawnless Nights, undoubtedly one of the most upbeat songs you’ll hear about existential angst (“there’s a dissension in my mind/Eluded by the act of time/Lost where fantasy and certainty entwine”) and nihilism (“I am an oblivion seeker”), while, opening with an echoey psychedelic swirl, Lost Again returns to the heady days of youth (“To be young again, how the time flies and leaves behind imagining and knowing what to say/There once was a day when a swirling Milky Way shone upon the lake creating a mirage of astral glade”) and remembering “feeling well at night, kind of God like/When days were just a morning with an evening in the way”. There’s even a chorus of la la la las as indeed there is on Willow, another, but slower memory of young romance (“You sang me the first verse of a gravedigger’s song/And it sounded so sweet in your Chippewa tongue/With skin like it’s kissed long from a winterless sun”), albeit with an undercurrent of sadness of a broken home (“it’s there that you told me, that your dad’s for good gone…Now come to light, I see you had to make him go”) behind the undulating drums and Spectorish crescendo.
Two decidedly Celtic-coloured tracks follow, the reflective (“I miss often the way we’d ramble on/Through the fields, wandering like the fawn/And we’d hear the plovers a’piping/To show us life in the simplest of song”) but jubilant (“I guess often I stare into the sun/O’r the hills and long beyond the river’s run/I take time to never mind/It shows me a life well worth the gamble on”) mandolin-led Flower of the Morning and the warblingly sung Play the Fiddle All Night which, referencing the song from when the album title comes, sounds like a heady brew of Planxty, The Waterboys and Shane Macgowan with yet more whoops.
Inspired by the rugged landscape of their home, nature imagery of flora and fauna is littered throughout, the shantyish swayalong Pink & Grey (where you might imagine a synth-less Men Without Hats) adding both thrush and cardinal to the previously mentioned plovers.
The mood takes a different turn on the fingerpicked rippling Mother, a poignant song of apology (“I’m sorry for stealing your wedding ring/While you scrubbed over the dishes”) and contrition for an unappreciated parent (“When the well was frozen/You’d hoist down the light to thaw/In the early morning while I lay in bed, safe and warm…I’m ashamed to tell you/While you were out bailing hay/I was inside complaining how you had no time for me”) as the narrator, grown old, comes to realise the sacrifices made.
It ends though on a rousing, linked arms, swigging drink and “pissed out of our minds” on the River Mira excursion into waters that draws on the Nova Scotia maritime heritage and the sense of being alive out on the waters dancing “fabulous jigs on the gunwale” as “we sing through the dimming of the day, and we skip along the top of cresting waves” because “when we’re not on the sea/We’re just rocks in the field”. In essence, a musical love letter to Cape Breton in all its wild beauty that really should have had the Nova Scotia tourist board falling over themselves to sponsor.
Order via Bandcamp: https://thebandvillages.bandcamp.com/album/dark-island