As demonstrated on their long-awaited fifth album, Strange News Has Come To Town, Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds remain as vital a musical force as ever.
Beleaguered by the pandemic, poor health and financial collapse, there’s no surprise that, produced by Ben Walker, Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds‘ fifth album, Strange News Has Come To Town, places personal issues front and foremost. The album opens with the rousing mission statement of the Appalachian goodtime fiddle and banjo bounce of the Simmonds-penned Optimist, where despite “fire in the fields and poison in the rain” and not being able to afford a mortgage, a car or even shoe repairs “even in a time like this/I find a reason to resist”.
With Walker on mandolin and Loz Bridge at the piano, Bedford’s DeMent-meets-the-McGarrigles Happiness Is A Way Of Traveling is described as a homage to anxiety as she sings, “Blue lights flashing make me think, they’re coming to put me in the clink/Red lights flashing mean problems I can’t afford to fix/Brown letters mean debts I can’t afford to pay, I always expect a rainy day”, resolving that “success is a state of mind”.
A mountain music equivalent of a shanty, the Sea Folk Sing Workshop collective assisting Simmons with the lyrics with Jason Kalidas on bansari (an Indian bamboo flute) and Bedford on lead, Haunted River is a ghost ship tale that takes its cue from the rotting hulks abandoned on Whitewall Creek on the River Medway and references The Temeraire, the Royal Navy gunship that was broken up in 1838 as the track itself ebbs away into the ambient fog.
A Bedford co-write with Justin Currie, I Love You Too features Dave Rothan on yearning pedal steel with banjo and tinkled piano and Richie Leo and Xan Tyler providing harmonies, bringing a moody backwoods Americana blues feel to proceedings.
Bedford on Appalachian dulcimer and Walker on mandolin, it shifts to an English folksy jauntiness with hints of the Watersons and Carthys on Simmonds’s simply arranged take on the traditional Lewiston Factory Girls, the second half opening with Ben Paley on fiddle for the slow walking rhythm dark folk allegory of Asylum which recounts the fate of three would-be migrants brothers setting out to sea from the Normandy beaches and meeting the watery fate of so many, its narrator the only survivor, locked up at Napier Barracks, the Kent detention centre for asylum seekers, the line “red blood, red cross, white flag for us/Red blood, red cross, white sheet, white cross” the haunting refrain.
With Bedford accompanying on shruti, Simmons takes the lead on I’ve Got A Fever. The spoken intro leads into a five-minute rambling and surreal folk blues pandemic horror movie (“There’s a strangler in the mist prowling through the lands…Cover your mouth, better stand still/If the germ don’t get you then the government will”).
Sounding a similar mortality note but more breezily front porch Appalachian spiritual folk with just guitar and mandolin accompanying Bedford, Dark Rolling Road is firmly in the death-comes-a-calling tradition, here in the figure of a hitchhiker and the final stop a churchyard with the driver’s name on a gravestone.
Returning to the traditional, Bedford accompanied by just guitar and pedal steel, A Blacksmith Courted Me, from whence comes the album title, was collected by Vaughn Williams in 1909 and is a familiar tale of an unfaithful lover, though Bedford gives it a darker, more brooding setting than the usual To Be A Pilgrim tune.
Simmonds is back in a surreal mood for the itchy bluesy rhythm Opposite Day, which, with its congas and wah-wah guitar, is a fair maiden’s dystopian quest odyssey through a post-truth Britain, riding an Audi 5 rather than a steed, to find what man desires, the inverted lyrics having the rich begging from the poor and police ensuring you break the law while also referencing nursery rhymes, and of course coming to the conclusion that man has no idea what he actually wants. It ends with the sole co-write, The Lapwing’s Call, Walker on both mandolin and slide, Bridge accompanying Bedford on piano for a cascading-notes-strummed rural ballad set at the returning Spring and the end of lockdown.
It’s been a long five years since their full-length album, but they remain as vital a musical force as ever, this is news that should be spread far and wide.
Strange News Has Come to Town is released June 28th via Dusty Willow Recordings/Proper Distribution
Pre-Order: Bandcamp | Propermusic
Tour Dates: https://naomibedford.com/gigs