The first thing you hear on Cadence, the new album by Cinder Well, is Amelia Baker’s voice. It is positioned high up in the mix, its clarity leavened by a barely perceptible raspiness. That very first line, ‘Crick in the side of the frozen moon,’ contains within it the kernel of what makes Baker’s music so compelling – the wildness and candour, the strength and vulnerability, the impressive eye for the details of the natural world, details that can be both vivid and easy to miss. Nature, landscape and history loom large over Cadence, but in ways that are more subtle than you might expect: the memory of the Irish landscape, where Baker has spent much of her recent past, is juxtaposed with the California coast she calls home, and where the album was recorded. And, as well as a juxtaposition of landscape, there is also a mingling of musical elements: Gaelic folk rubbing shoulders with the Laurel Canyon sound to produce a sound that is both more mature and more raw than previous Cinder Well releases.
That wonderful opening track, Two Heads, Grey Mare, occupies multiple spaces at once. The title itself, with its strange, mysterious doubling, could be the title of a surreal painting, a piece of outsider art from the margins of the countryside or the fringes of physical possibility. The ‘two heads’ could suggest the two landscapes – similar but very different – that inspire Baker’s work. Crisp, metallic guitar plays off against a tease of bowed strings. By the end of the song, the dramatic, impressionistic sweeps seem to weave themselves around the comparatively simple core. This is folk music with a widescreen vision and a gothic flourish.
That hint of the gothic has become something of a calling card for Cinder Well, though here it is less obvious than on previous albums. Any sense of grandiosity comes less from darkness and more from a use of space that can best be described as elemental. If Cadence has a central character, it is the ocean; if it has a central theme, it is change, the kind of slow, shifting change that defines the passage of a human life or a body of work. This is perhaps most evident in the masterful title track, which is an object lesson in growth. In apparently simple lines like ‘you know what the pain is for/your heart is breaking forth,’ there is the echo of the tide’s movement and the acceptance of personal change with all its difficulties and hurt. Towards the end of the song is a wild, wordless vocalisation that exists on the edges of tonality: it represents a shift, a moment of catharsis. Like much of Baker’s best music, it is truly powerful and a little frightening.
Moments of shimmering prettiness are frequently fathomable within the record’s overriding depth: the acoustic guitar on Overgrown is like the glint of light on water, while Baker’s singing on the chorus is positively peppy, repeating the single word of the song’s title as if entreating the forest to continue its growth unabated. It is one of many examples of her deep affinity with the land. There are two threads at work here, in line with the album’s unspoken motif of doubling: one of ecological change and one of personal change. What Baker does brilliantly is tie those two threads together, letting us know that we are inextricably linked to the landscapes we inhabit.
These songs build their moods in a multitude of ways. The chorus of The Returning has a sweetly melancholic melody that becomes almost anthemic with repetition, while the short interlude Well On Fire uses the most minimal of musical backing to frame Baker’s powerful singing, as she uses the strength and adaptability of plants as a metaphor for the better facets of human nature. Here and throughout the album, the instrumentation feels perfectly weighted, which is a testament to the clarity of Baker’s overall vision as a songwriter and performer and also to the skill of her collaborators. Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada provides the album’s string arrangements, nipping expertly between the capacious and the intimate as the mood requires.
The quiet, wandering melody of Crow belies an underlying darkness which has always been present in Cinder Well’s songs and which bubbles to the surface on an electric guitar line that evokes some of that old gothic tension. Neal Heppleston’s bass also helps recreate the mildly menacing nature of certain wild landscapes, while Crow’s lyrics have a cryptic, elliptical quality rooted in an understanding of the countryside that seems to come from pre-Christian religion. This is perhaps where Baker’s writing veers closest to the ‘neofolk’ or ‘gothic folk’ labels that have sometimes been ascribed to her.
But Baker is too varied and distinctive an artist to be constrained by one or even a handful of genres. Comparisons to Nic Jones, Stevie Nicks or Jean Ritchie could conceivably be made, but that wouldn’t tell the full story. Gone The Holding, for example, is what Joni Mitchell might have sounded like if she had tried Celtic folk in the early 70s, while A Scorched Lament switches from an a cappella to something that sounds both ancient and exploratory, with a soft yet oddly propulsive acoustic guitar riff that Alasdair Roberts would be proud of. At times it’s closer to the New Weird America of Six Organs of Admittance or P.G. Six than the darker but more stylings of neofolk. The final song, I Will Close In The Moonlight, has an atmosphere all of its own, a dusky, sleepy soundworld created with nothing but a few sombre piano chords and Baker’s singing, which is confident and world-weary and somehow full of hope.
An album about the journeys we make through life, Cadence is itself something of a journey. Meandering, non-linear, but full of care and wisdom, it is an astonishingly powerful piece of work that seems to have been conceived in uncertainty but realised with the supreme assurance of one of the most consummate songwriters around.
‘Cadence” is out April 21 on Free Dirt Records – https://lnk.to/cadence
CINDER WELL TOUR DATES
EU
MAY 13 – Uppsala, SE – Uppsala Konsert & Kongress
IE
MAY 18 – Kilkenny, IE – Cleere’s
MAY 19 – Dublin, IE – The Cobblestone
MAY 20 – Dublin, IE – The Cobblestone
MAY 26 – Cork, IE – Coughlan’s
MAY 27 – Waterford, IE – Phil Grimes
UK
SEPT 2 – End of the Road Festival
Website: https://cinderwellmusic.com
BANDCAMP: https://cinderwell.bandcamp.com/album/cadence
