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Following last year’s Lullabies album, Toronto songstress Abigail Lapell returns to her own material for Anniversary, an album of love songs variously inspired by turning 40, the fifteenth anniversary of her father’s passing and several family weddings and births. She addresses the romantic ideal of growing old together, tracking the revolving days, seasons and years in reflecting the notion of eternal love and the attendant dichotomies of light and dark, love and loss, such as the wedding vows ‘in sickness and health and for richer or poorer’.

Recorded in a 200-year-old Ontario church adjoining a cemetery (and using the in-house harpsichord on the opener) with Great Lake Swimmers frontman Tony Dekker as co-producer as well as featuring on three tracks, a mix of folksy and orchestral country-jazz arrangements, it begins, her vocals double-tracked, with the sort of title track, Anniversary Song and lyrics celebrating the symbolism of commitment as, playing on the idea of chemistry,  they overlay traditional anniversary gifts with the periodic table of elements (“Will it be cotton or leather?/Mercury and iron, carbon, silver/bind us together”).

Lapell on piano, augmented by double bass, pipe organs and viola, the slowly building Bronte-esque Footsteps was inspired by her mother’s recurring dreams of her late husband coming back to the house  (“I hear the echo of your footsteps on the floor/I feel a shiver in my bones/How can I tell you you don’t live here anymore”) and the power of love to simultaneously haunt and console (“I hear you calling out my name/I light a candle in the darkness/I’m just the keeper of the flame/Keeping time as you fade to silence”).

Featuring Michael Davidson on marimba and vibraphone, echoey drums introduce the rumbling folksy Americana of Count On Me, a duetted vow of constancy with  Dekker (“Walk in sunshine walk in shadow/Where you go you know I will follow/Fortune I can only guess/A change of heart or just a change of address/I will be there”) and the brevity but sweetness of time shared (“Our joys are countless though the years are few/And all my days/I will always count on you”).

The traditional flavoured foot stomping Rattlesnake, with its distorted finger-style electric guitar, handclap percussion, and wordless wailings, is an ode to love and the superstition of omens and herbalist incantations (“Sew a penny in your shoe/Blessings on the journey/I’ll cut a lock of hair for you / And keep the fire burning…If you find a rattlesnake/Put it in your fiddle/Play it at the funeral wake/To keep away the devil”).

Lapell on harmonica and Tania Gill on barroom piano with Joe Lapinski playing pedal steel, the lovelorn Blue Blaze (“I woke up in an indigo cloud/You were long gone [my love was gone], with the faded dawn/Left me lying there, crying out loud”) has an old school prairie cowboy country slow sway that draws its lyrical inspiration from Plaisir d’amour, the line “A sad song lasts a whole life long/When the pleasure of love is so brief” expressing how music can memorialise the joy and pain of love.

Chiming guitar carries the slow-walking folk pop Someone Like You, which picks up that idea (“I’ll sing you a song that never ends/When it’s done begin again”) and comes with undercurrent themes of insecurity and endings (“When you’re gone there’s no replacement”), Lapell’s warbling evocative of a fusion of Sandy Denny and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

 Rebecca Hennessy brings trumpet to the insomnia-haunted piano hymnal 3am with its  lost love ache (“I wanna turn my life around/Maybe then we’ll meet again/Move to a different town/Or maybe you’ll call me up/You used to call me up/Just to try to calm me down/Gonna get back on my feet, gotta get back/On solid ground …I guess I’ve lived alone too long/To live any other way”)

 In musical and lyrical contrast,  again featuring Dekker, and recorded live-off-the-floor with claps and stomps Flowers In My Hair is an a capella singalong in the tradition of children’s playground songs (“I don’t need a diamond ring/Don’t need much of anything/I don’t have a thing to wear/I got flowers in my hair”), Dekker then contributing saw to the strum-along Blue Electric Skies, a haunting ballad of ambivalence and infatuation that veers between love song and breakup (“Love is impatient/Love is so unkind/The only consolation/I could ever find/It’s all I could ever find/All that could ever bind us together”) and suggests she may have a few Neil Young records in the collection. It’s also quite probably the only song to ever have the word ‘cyanotic’ in the lyrics.

After the generally acoustic and laid-back nature of the preceding tracks, she gets gnarly for Wait  Up with throaty electric guitar and Hennessy’s on trumpet for a love story that’s both dysfunctional and irresistible as she declares “I was a cold hearted bastard/With a gunmetal grin/You were a natural disaster/Rattling the door till I let you in… I was a hard-headed hypocrite/You a two-faced/two-faced layabout/I don’t know how I can live with it/I don’t know how I can live without it”.

It ends with one more round for Dekker on vocals, with the again hymnal Stars, a stripped back guitar and piano companion to I Can’t Believe on 2022’s Stolen Time, a dreamily romantic image of staring up at the night sky stars (“One for every song I wish I’d sung/Every love I’ve never known”) with the one you love (“I know you’re here now beside me dear/And I’ll never sing alone… there is no place I’d rather be, nothing I would rather do/Than to hold you tight on an August night and count the stars with you”).

With music and songs such as these, let’s hope that albums by Abigail Lapell will continue to be an annual event.

Anniversary – 10th May 2024 on Outside Music – https://ffm.to/anniversary

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Parenthesis, I, Josienne Clarke’s latest album, follows on from last year’s Onliness, with the musicians involved in that release lending their support once again on this collection of new material: Alec Bowman-Clarke on bass, Dave Hamblett on drums, and Matt Robinson on keyboards. Josienne plays guitar, clarinet, recorder, and saxophone.

The songs are often deeply confessional, albeit couched in oblique and metaphorical imagery, a case in point being the airy, shuffling opener Friendly Teeth, a song about needing people to be honest with her (“there’s nothing more ugly than lies upon lies upon lies… I’ve been everyone’s fool/And lies are the harshest cruelty”), about making her own decisions (“An ounce of trepidation in my step/With a slight discomfort in my zone/To leap, carefully, into the unknown”) and calling for a “truth so strong/That it comes right up and bites you on the shoulder with its friendly teeth”.

Geometry has its place in her store of images, the carousel rhythm of Spherical exploring getting back to herself (“I’ve been drawing a circle/Back to myself/So slowly it looked like a line/That I went way off/Faraway from the place/That I started”), picking up the notion that in my end is my beginning, but also drawing on magical ideas of protection (“I’ve been drawing a circle/Around myself/To keep from the dangerous/Dark eclipsing/Circling round the doubt/A ring/To never let in or give out”, capturing the sense of both being safe but also trapped within such defences.

Just voice and watery fingerpicked guitar, while influences such as  Nick Drake, Sandy Denny and Anaïs Mitchell are often cited, Fear Of Falling also casts her as a pastoral folk prototype for newcomers such as Katherine Priddy and Flo Perlin, though it also filters the Americana colours of Courtney Marie Andrews in a song about leaving the past behind and embracing the future (not flying for fear of falling), the lyrics peppered with imagery drawn from her new home on the Isle of Bute (“The birds are singing brightly in the tall trees of Skeoch wood/And scarcely I believed that peace of mind in life could be as good”).

Of a jazzier persuasion, Do You Know Now?, with its nervy, neurotic keyboard pulse, is an exorcism of sorts as she sings, “There’s no blood and no bone/To connect me to you/No familiar, no friend/Every contact cut or ended… do you know now/That no part of me/Is a part of you”, whether that’s disconnecting from a person or a mental state. Coloured with sax, Looking Glass sustains that cool, jazzy vibe to a song that conjures a composed detachment (“Poised and precise/Glass and ice/Always be nice/Just a slice, a sliver/Fine on the eye/I can reliably refine/What you like”) while the plucked electric guitar figure and glacial Forbearing wrings the heart with lyrics that touch on the despair of her miscarriages (“It broke my heart/‘Til I, willing to die/Could see no light/In my fruitless life”) and the way it made her feel about herself (“If damaged fruit/Is all I can give to you/That‘ll have to do… I can’t bear/Bring myself to blame myself again/It isn’t fair/We’re all taught to tear ourselves apart”).  

There’s more soul-baring on the compact, stripped-back lo-fi autobiographical Most of All, a number, the original haunted demo she describes as “a licking of wounds and counting of blessings, taking stock and setting straight in my head”, with lines like “There’s a room where everyone hangs on my every word/But in our haunted house my daddy rarely heard a word I said …My mother praised me for being truthful all my days/But I needed things that I did not say/I did not ask, did not complain/I let my wants wash away… I let the heartless make a host of me/And they plundered me for melody/Left me not a note to sing”, again exposing the raw nerve of her miscarriages (“Maybe I won’t be no one’s mother in the end/I took the pills, the potions and the vitamins/But I could not keep my darlings in”), though for all that, it’s ultimately a song of defiance (“I will not live my life in pain/If I can’t see the way on any given day/I’ll take a breath and look again”) and finding peace (“My lover loves me most of all/He can write a beautiful love song but he can barely sing at all”).

Though just under two minutes, Double-Edged Sword, with its repeated rippling guitar pattern, is one of the album’s most complex tracks with its double-tracked vocals, keyboard drone and full band on another defiant note and refusal to surrender (“Bring me a double edged sword, and I’ll show you an iron will …My ability to stay alive’s my only power”). Featuring jazzy piano, things turn to a soulful folk persuasion on the upfront love song that is Firecracker (“You’re a loose cannon baby and I’m a firecracker/What a beautiful mess we make/Leaving dust in our wake/Laying waste to it all”) that echoes Neil Young’s better to burn out than fade away credo  (“Like moths to a flame/Drowning in shame/We’re losing every game/Cos we’d rather find out/Excluding all doubt/And go brightly burning out …As we spoil for a fight/And triumph overall”).

The longest track, opening with simple distant piano notes and scuffed drums before the repeated sparse guitar motif, A Dead Woman’s Bones is also the closest she lyrically gets to a traditional folk number (“He plays a song/On a lute he made/Its pure tone/Made of dead woman’s bones/The tune he plays/Are the notes he stole/And those words/Such lovely words/Such poetry/A dead woman’s poems”) though you’re unlikely to find anything like “His literal hand on her metaphorical throat” in the Cecil Sharp library.

It hits the last lap with piano and fingerpicked The Calm with its whisperingly sung sense of having survived the vicissitudes (“When all’s said and done/Under the sun/You can’t kill me/I won/So getting stronger/Has begun… Growing the sweetest of roses from the thorns/Going the closest to breaking, being reborn”) as it quietly builds and soars before ebbing away.

Accompanied by keyboard drone, the slow walking rhythm title track provides the penultimate number with its theme of recovery, living life outside the imprisoning brackets (“Parenthesis, I (think I) am done with you…put cessation in its place and face down the demon/Now darkness is only an absence of light in its space/To keep staring into the void/Re-wounding indefinitely is a choice/I choose not to make/A path it didn’t take/Undestroyed”), where “There are windows to open/A curtain to draw/To let hope out the building/Let the winds roar through the halls”.

It ends, then, with the brushed drums, piano,  circling guitar and soaring background choral vocals of  Magic, Somehow, a reaffirmation of what the power of a song can do for those who hear it (“Sing us one of your sad songs/The one about love/Make it make us give in and never give up… Sing us one of your sad songs/The one about time/Make us die on the inside/And feel so alive/Tell us the world is illusion/But you know the truth/Say it’s beautiful, show us proof”). The album an affirmation that out of the deepest darkness sometimes comes the brightest light, to paraphrase her lyric, Clarke spins her alchemy, she gives us hope.

Parenthesis, I is released on 9th May 2024 on Corduroy Punk.
https://josienneclarke.bandcamp.com/album/parenthesis-i

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Massachusetts duo Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards return with Making Promises, their fourth studio album, once more steeped in their close harmony folksy Americana with several stripped-back acoustic songs inspired by their marriage in 2021. Appropriately, it opens on a romantic note with the circling fingerpicked When Love Comes ‘Round Again (“it doesn’t ask to be let in, need permission, or forgiveness or fair warning to begin”),  leading to the local progression of the mandolin-flecked duetted Make A Home (“a shingle of our own, a stove to warm our bodies by and a land to reap and sow/a flame to light the darkness, a candle burning dim, a dance with every breath you’re breathin’ in”).

Raianne on lead, accompanied by mandolin and guitar, Another Day Tomorrow is about asking, “Have you tried the best you can”, learning from the past  (“what is life if not a lesson/what is time if not a gift”), looking to the future, moving on from setbacks and resolving “to be a better man”. Doubtless inspired by wedding vows, Mark steps back up for the mid-tempo Making Promises, asking what they mean and why we make them (“they make liars out of those/not strong enough to find/a means to remember/a reason from the heart/a testament we finish everything we start/to see through to the end and claim no great reward/the prize is in the going never doubt whatever for”), Raianne joining on for the final stretch.

Conjuring the air of the hot summer evening and fireflies he sings about in the first line, One Who Don’t repeats the title line for each verse as is, as the line says, about those who “don’t see the forest from trees”, a song about the need for empathy and understating in the way we approach others and the world around us. One of two numbers recorded at earlier sessions and another that uses the forest/trees image, the slow waltzing, woodwind-coloured Only A Matter Of Time with Doug Williamson on piano is, as the title suggests, about things that come around and change, for better or worse (“heads you come clean, get on with things, tails, there’s nowhere to hide…what goes up must come down and ember gets free from the flame”) and how “there’s always a price to be paid, a balance between loss and gain”.

 A bluegrass-style ballad with appropriate instrumentation, Reflecting is about the struggle to know what’s right when times get hard, “spending hours wrestling with which side is a dream and which is life” and having to “hold on to the feeling like a dim lighthouse light” when the darkness threatens to engulf you and knowing which way you end up facing having been spun around.

Hello Bill has a very specific backdrop, being a memory of and tribute to one “Shakey” Bill Rabitor, a pedal steel player and frequenter of the  Blackstone Valley Music School where Mark teaches, his nickname coming from the effects of his medication, who would recount stories from his youth (“when I pick up the banjo/I remember each time you’d recall the tale/while in the navy you learned to play guitar”), who donated his   60’s Stratocaster “for the kids to play a knock off Neil Young”, spending his last days in a veterans home, cassette tape of him rehearsing being played at the funeral.

The last of the original material,   taking its title from the Eugene O’Neill play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a beguilingly lovely clarinet-shaded simple folksy fingerpicked lullaby of sorts musing on mortality but not giving up  (“after all these trials/just to say we’ve had enough/seems like a fear of tryin’/when the goin’ gets tough”), it sets the scene for the closing track, the other earlier recording, with Raianne on vocals and clarinet, accompanied by Williamson’s piano and Peter Hart on pedal steel, for a rendition of Auld Lang Syne that has the musical equivalence of the peaty taste of a vintage Laphroaig. Unfussy, with no unnecessary frills, this is immaculately constructed and seamlessly played organic contemporary yet timeless folk music that comes from and speaks to the heart. The legendary music critic Robert Christgau once said, “In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better”. Theirs is a promise they will not break.

Out on 9th May 2024 on Nobody’s Favourite Records