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Fidra’s debut album, ‘The Running Wave,’ is one of the finest Scottish folk albums of the year.
Taking their name from the island off the East Lothian coast, purported to be the inspiration for Treasure Island, and translated as “feather island”, fronted by Edinburgh-based Craig Salter, Fidra are a folk project from Leith with musicians drawn from across Scotland, among them Sara Gallagher on harmonies and Withered Hand bassist Fraser Hughes. Following on from 2022’s Broken Ground EP, The Running Wave is their debut album of indie-infused Scottish folk, which, with influences as diverse as Karine Polwart, Neil Young, Lau and Mogwai, reflects on life in Scotland.
Three tracks, all over five minutes, are resurrected from the EP, with the remaining nine all-new, the album opening with the moody scene-setting prelude Follow Me Down, the sound of waves giving way to chimed reflective guitar notes before percussion thump, wheezing harmonium drone and Salter’s echoing, chanted vocals enter ending with its refrain evocation, “Pray to St Andrew, go to St John/Follow me down/Into the water/Darkness is coming, before it’s too long”.
Flowing directly into the lengthy drone intro and Pedro Cameron’s (Man of the Minch) atmospheric melancholic fiddle before fingerpicked acoustic arrives, the seven-minute First Light is one of several touching on mortality (“everyone must end/And give way to the breaking dawn”) with its mingling of sadness and salve (“Though years have left me all alone to rue/The sea and the running wave/Stirs the glad and the tired mind/Decades thaw and run/The sight returning to the blind/You tell me that you’ll never leave/While there’s breath to carry on”) and images of a life away from home working at sea (“Iron on the sea/And the salt inside the lung/Coal smoke fading out/To the engine’s working song/Tell me you can see for miles/To the town of glass and stone”).
Addressing the impact of changes to life, particularly fishing and crofting communities around Scotland’s coasts and islands, the airy, echoingly fingerpicked Gannets reprises the refrain from the opener as Salter sings of a bleak island life (“It’s raw and it’s lashed, this place we call home/Build with our blood, on deep earth’s hard stone”) balancing images of those who left with those who remained (“You stayed in this place, fortune you did not find/Your sons and your daughters have left you behind/There’s ever a change and heartbreaking ways”) and a resigned stoicism (“I’ll take what I need, and I’ll take from your hands/Oh sing me to sleep, or bring me to land/Leave us to sink, or take us to task/Or sit in this house, and dream of the past”) tinged with a desire to find some sort of peace (“It’s the end of the day, and the shadows are long/These birds they are on the wing/I’d take my rest so gratefully/If I could just hear them sing”), the gannets representative of the things that endure .
Again, with a lengthy instrumental intro, drawing on a familiar traditional folk theme, with an arrangement to suit, Carter and Gallagher sharing verses with Madeline Stewart on fiddle, Far From You was inspired by the true story of a young Scottish lad called up to serve in WWII and sent to North Africa, thinking of the lover left behind (“Oil and smoke and decades gone/In this conflict in the sun/From Baghdad down to Cairo/From the pulpit to the gun/I’ll look to you when I am home/That we might find our lot/By the barley or the stone”). Likened to the work of Frightened Rabbit, it’s followed by the simply picked swaying lament Mortal Boy, the tale of someone living a hedonistic lifestyle and thinking he’s invincible, but finding himself battling the demons of drink and loneliness (“Silent he sleeps in the trackless main/The world it has turned, and it’s left him again/Take what you want, not what you need/Breaking it down, letting it bleed”).
Featuring Cameron’s fiddle, inspired by Nan Shepherd’s work The Living Mountain and referencing the waters that feed and run from Loch Avon in the Cairngorms and memories of Salter’s many visits there, the stripped back fingerpicked and strummed swaying ballad Water A’n again looks to those moments of tranquillity (“In lowland paths/I’ll show you the still/Birks tell tales of rainfall/That’s lost to the swell”) and plays like weary benediction in times of despair (“May you never yearn/The dark water’s song/May you never cry for/The still before the dawn”).
“Will we break for the running sea, or hide beneath the driven snow?/Or will we run on forever, dreaming of that distant shore?” Salter asks in the opening lines of the troubadour folk blues fingerpicked Rooms Below, another song that (possibly of a pandemic inclination) strikes a nihilistic note (“There’s young men in the open houses, old hide in their rooms below/You can’t avoid the death of culture, empty halls and empty shows”) and a closing swipe at blind sanguinity (“Optimism springs eternal, tripping in without a care/You never see the storm clouds gather, or the coming sunless year”).
Opening with harmonium drone and pealing guitar notes, set to a steady percussive thump and driving rhythm, telling of a Gretna Green marriage that is doomed to failure. By The Border is again veined with allusions to appearance and reality (“Take me to your kindred home/Regale them all with pretty tales/A fiction just for you and me”), resignation to failure (“The vow, the vow, is a sacred cow/A promise that you’ll never keep/The iron shackle’s blessed bond/The sowing that we’ll never reap”) and problematic relationships (“We’re standing by this border town/Tell you not to ask for more/A martyr’s cross was on your back/A feeling I could not restore.. Losing in the war/And drowning in the sea/I would run from you/But you’re running back at me”), of striving to please others, and people coming to terms with who they really are.
The deceptively musically bright Salt River echoes the sentiments, built on images of mortality (“There’s precious time for us to lose/Before we run into a sombre night”), toxic environment (“The salt river flows, to poison the land”), trying to escape (“Here’s a chance and now’s the time/To make a break and to make a run”) but not having the strength (“you cannot run, when you’ve so much to hide/You’ll never know more, you’ll never know more than this in your life… We’ve run aground, we’ll never move/And the river it comes pouring in/Rooted and to never leave/To pay the price for each and every sin”).
Heralded by a doomy intro giving way to a slow funereal march rhythm, Where We Come To Grow, punctuated by washes of fiddle, speaks of trying to make a life in a forbidding landscape (“See the scars from our labour on the broken ground/Count your losses, what is gone to the river’s sound”) and defiance in the face of the odds (“We will stand in the face of the living gale/If we’re numb, if we’re broken, and we fail/If the plateau is the place that we’ve come to grow/There are only seeds of the granite stone to sow/Drowning in the water’s song/Crossing paths where we belong/Marking time before we go/Falling to the moonlit snow”), clinging to a dream (“To wake in the cool of the gentle dawn/From trouble’s frozen river to be drawn”) but crushed by loss and the inevitable (“It’s twenty miles to the home where we rest alone/It’s been 20 years since our hope has been and gone/Just follow me to toil a few more days/To the shelter stone or the shelter of the grave”).
Notably contemporary and departing from Scottish themes while drawing on the album’s recurring imagery of land, rivers and sea, built on a muscular fiddle line by Cameron and a stirring chorus, the last of the new numbers is the gradually building anthemic None Left For Sorrow, written in response to the suffering in Palestine under a constant Israeli onslaught (“you tell us that we’re free/Born to a land that’s our own/When their walls and their wire darken our home… It’s late in the night on the radio/Seems that all of the world condones/Saying that we’re human animals/Tainting their God-given home”) and a feeling of helplessness at being unable to do anything (“There’s none left for sorrow/No sweet voice to say/To promise tomorrow/And deliver today”).
Concerning mental health and how we deal or fail to deal with its crises, it ends with the final EP track and more seafaring metaphors, the circling fingerpicked acoustic Sounding The Depth, the second to speak of the harr, the Scottish term for a sea mist, conjuring imagery of the darkness of a Scottish winter to emblemise a struggle against the tempestuous elements (“You’ll sink as far as she can stand/Steel yourself for one more blow/Never cast your eyes to land”) and a defiant embracing of whatever fate lies ahead (“Take this bloody broken hand/And lead me to the bitter end…I’ve taken what I will from you/Thrown aside and left there for the dead/So we will haste and we will go/Follies soon will crumble to the sea/Burn the bridge that takes you home/Old glories that are running after me…Hold to you what is so dear/And kindly treat each and every tear”).
‘The Running Wave,’ is as rugged, passionate, and enigmatic as the beautifully unforgiving land it celebrates. It’s one of the finest Scottish folk albums of the year.
The Running Wave (2 August 2024) Self-released
Pre-Order: https://fidra.bandcamp.com/album/the-running-wave
