Brothers Mik and Rich Hanscomb, who perform together as Junkboy, have long been preoccupied with edges and fringes, the musical spaces where one state slips unnoticed into another. They have skirted the boundaries of folk, ambient, dream pop, post-rock and Ghost Box-style hauntology in varying degrees and, in recent years, have alchemised this tendency into something that is more definitively tied up with landscapes and the feelings they evoke. Littoral States is their most place-centred album yet, and paradoxically their most ambiguous, dealing simultaneously with the Sussex coast and with universal feelings of grief and renewal.
Opener Cormorant at the Mouth of the Ouse tumbles along, a softly fingerpicked guitar and the occasional swell of strings backed up by loose, shingly percussion. It invokes the spirit of Bert Jansch’s Avocet: its strokes are impressionistic rather than programmatic, and the mood, if not entirely calm, is anchored within the landscape. As its title suggests, Littoral States is an album of shorelines, of the unique, shifting edgelands demarcated by water and rock and foam. So, while a song may be rooted to a locale, it remains fluid and often difficult to pin down.
The very specific nature of Sussex’s folkloric landscape is brought to bear on Chase the Knucker, a tribute to the county’s own mythic sea dragon. The song, augmented by Hannah Lewis’ vocals, bounds along with folk-pop energy, pitched somewhere between Sandy Denny at her most melodic and XTC at their most bucolic. Lewis is a characterful presence on Littoral States: her wordless wails on the delightfully melodramatic Witch of the Watery Depths are perfectly complemented by some psychy electric guitar, a satisfying billow of strings and the stormy crash of cymbals. Lewis’ singing is at its most impressionistic and enigmatic on the atmospheric An Easier Time, trading licks with the most vintage-sounding of guitars.
Muted horns begin Cuckmere River Rises – there is something of Harvest Records’ 1970s output here, perhaps the strange Englishness of Roy Harper, but at every turn, it is played off against a more cosmopolitan sound: the brothers acknowledge the influence of Brian Wilson, and particularly the Beach Boys’ semi-realised Elements suite. The combination of colliery brass, surf-rock guitars and subtle field recordings is surprisingly effective, and Wilson himself would be impressed at the Hanscomb’s talents as arrangers.
There is an element of cleansing or rejuvenation in the Hanscomb brothers’ music: the album was in part inspired by the death of their father and a shared familial love for the coastal Sussex countryside, and there is a general sense of loss – and of hope – throughout Littoral States which seems bound up with the presence of the sea. The soft bustle of The Sea Captain feels particularly tender, and Lewis’ vocal has an element of joyous release. The folk revival surface of the song peels away to reveal something more ambiguous and alluring.
Field recordings are important here – Tidemills Twilight is full of bubbling birdsong. A peaceful rumination on an abandoned village, it’s the closest the brothers get to the psychogeographic themes that were more prevalent on their previous album, the Essex-inspired Trains, Trees, Topophilia (2019). Landlocked, another pastoral instrumental, follows a similar path: tweets and corvid croaks filter through a robust concoction of strummed and plucked guitars, while strings and organ give the piece a feeling of stateliness, perhaps even religiosity (though if that’s the case, it is an older and more atavistic form of religiosity).
Final track, Tall Grass, is a deceptively complex composition: the sheer depth and warmth of the sound is admirable, and conceals a wealth of discrete musical elements held together by a knack for careful arrangement and an ear for a beautiful melody. It’s emblematic of the subtle art of Junkboy: the ability to make melodic, intelligent, haunting music that slips in and out of genres but always stays true to the overarching theme of places and how human emotions interact with those places. Littoral States is an engulfing and satisfying half-hour.
Bandcamp: https://junkboytheband.bandcamp.com/