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Through OPHELIA, Angeline Morrison conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music…imagine if Broadcast’s Trish Keenan had been kidnapped at birth by the Copper family and raised on a diet of Angela Carter’s fairy tales…
Somewhere along the line, Angeline Morrison has become a bit of a national treasure, at least to those in the know. Her vision of England is one built on the weird and the uncanny, celebratory in its strangeness and hallucinatory in its detail. She has a knack for brightening the most obscure corners of music and folklore, and she does so with an openness that reflects the vitality and inclusivity of the genre at its best. Her most recent albums – 2022’s The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs, and The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience (also 2022) – both dealt, directly or tangentially, with race and the historic imbalance of equality in folk music and in wider society. Both were exceptional: bracing, thought-provoking, haunting, and musically impeccable.
Morrison obviously likes to do things in twos. Where The Brown Girl was a precursor of sorts to The Sorrow Songs, OPHELIA is set to have its own companion piece in an album of alchemy-themed songs set for release next year. But that’s not to say it can’t be listened to as a complete work on its own terms; indeed, Ophelia has a character all of its own. The songs are all originals, and the music is rooted in the sort of eerie hauntological experimentation that Morrison previously espoused as leader of the wyrd folk collective The Ambassadors of Sorrow.
The album opens with field recordings of birdsong and water, echoed by Morrison’s kalimba. This first song, Clouds Never Move, is ostensibly a fleeting if atmospheric thing, but just below the surface lies a more profound message about truth and the obligation to speak it. It may come as a surprise after a casual listen to learn that it was written in response to the murder of George Floyd, but the more you hear of Morrison’s work, the less surprised you will be at these subtle but meaningful interjections of personal politics. There are few artists as skilled at getting a point or multiple points across with such fluency and grace, and here she does it with weird, bucolic England as the beautiful, hazy backdrop.
A feeling of heady, narcotic bliss intercut with a message that is sweetly delivered but socially aware: that is the atmosphere of many of these songs, not least the title track, which uses Shakespeare’s character as a way to explore impressionistic, watery sonics. The combination of gentle acoustic guitar, autoharp and multitracked vocals create a strange musical landscape somewhere between Virginia Astley and the Wicker Man soundtrack, and the lyrics turn a light on grief, mental illness and death with stark honesty and refreshing positivity. In fact, death and ghosts are a constant presence on this album: He Comes in the Night is the story of a literal haunting, but given a sense of ambiguity by Morrison’s impressive lyrics. She has a gift for expanding tiny details until they represent whole strange worlds, and here, motes of dust become the only things that can be shared by the ghost and his former lover. The fixation on dust is reflected in the dry sound of Morrison’s keyboard: it’s a song with the air sucked out of it, leaving only the smallest, most exquisite details.
Morrison has embraced the aural language of hauntology on this album, perhaps more than ever before: imagine if Broadcast’s Trish Keenan had been kidnapped at birth by the Copper family and raised on a diet of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, and you might be getting somewhere near the sound of The Fat Lady Sings, with its clear, bright-eyed dulcimer or the home-made music box of Circular Waltz, which splices psychedelic Edwardiana with Alan Garner-esque folk horror. Bright Blessings utilises the drone of a shruti to create a hazy, miasmic ambience, while I Close My Arms to You sounds like a love song from another, eerily unspecified time.
The Ghost of a Song seems like something of a departure, a hushed strum that evokes the Bleecker Street balladry of the 1960s, before a melodica cuts across the grain of the song, drawing you away from the drowsiness of the melody back to the quietly self-referential lyrics. A Quiver in the Heart is more Brill Building than Greenwich Village, a sweetly melodic, melancholic, and slightly uncanny love song. Almost, But Not Quite ends the album with wide-eyed, nursery rhyme simplicity, but as in most nursery rhymes, there are hidden depths.
There are certain kinds of music, certain moods provoked by particular sequences or combinations of sounds, that can swallow up whole afternoons. There are albums that can apparently stop or speed up time, that exist in the hinterlands between dream and wakefulness. Albums that seem to create their own miniature weather systems. OPHELIA is one such album. It conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music and holds your hand like a ghostly child to lead you through that landscape.
OPHELIA (20th September 2024) Self Released
Bandcamp: https://angelinemorrisonmusic.bandcamp.com/album/ophelia-album
