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One half of alt-folk duo India Electric Company and longtime Midge Ure sideman, Cole Stacey’s debut solo album, Postcards from Lost Places, opens with Quiet Is Louder, the first song written for the project, recorded in a converted Victorian clay factory in Devon. The vastness of the space and the adjacent Victorian mining site at Morwellham Quay afford a sense of stillness and historical introspection, his early morning walks to collect wood captured in the atmospheric musical framework of acoustic guitars, and the breathy, slightly husky vocals and soaring refrain (“The darkest hour is just before the dawn/Oh there’s a change of power just before the dawn/Sometimes when the quiet is louder /We’re invisible”).
There’s an unanticipated excursion into American traditional territory with a wearied, stripped-down reading of Hard Times (Come Again No More), a plea for relief in times of suffering, recorded in St Paul’s Church in Yelverton on its old Steinway piano. The rest of the material is all self-penned, either alone or with Emily Wood, the first being the uplifting All We Are (“It’s only from the heart that you can touch the sky”), albeit the lyrics adapted from an anonymous 17th-century poem Love will find out the way, written on mandolin and set to a sparkling guitar line and Hammond organ by Jack Cookson.
If It Helps is the first of four tracks to feature Emilija Karaliute on Kanklės, a Lithuanian zither, as well as scampering guitar, steady percussive beat and splash of trumpet. He describes it as the album’s most personal song, about the purest love paired with the feeling of helplessness of watching people close to you battle with themselves, and their illness and “the shame of not being able to do enough to help someone so young take their own life”. Yet, despite that, it’s also optimistic as it celebrates the small things in life and the joy others can bring, even if only for a moment (“If it helps then/Even for a moment/We’ll empty all our pockets/Of the cynics and the scars… It’s only when it’s dark enough/We can see the stars”).
Again featuring Karaliute plucking the strings, the quietly soothing For Old Time’s Sake, recorded at The Music House For Children in London, features heartfelt reflective words (“Of the dreams we made/Hold the memories/let the past awake”) that he discovered in a hundred-year-old songbook, the tune adapted from Your Story And Mine by 19th/20th century English composer Annie Jessie Fortescue Harrison aka Lady Arthur Hill.
Last Supper is, on what would end side one of a vinyl album, the first of two spoken word passages, here about the inevitability of mortality, of what’s lost and loss itself (“When two bodies stopped/Making one shadow/And both hands stopped telling time… He’d never lost a side of the bed before/It was like unlearning how to swim/Or only pedalling backwards/In a race he couldn’t win…But you can’t deny the autumn/You can’t deny the frost”).
The music resumes with Russell Field’s drum pulse and frills on Sugarcanes, a track which amalgamates preceding elements, octave mandolin and Kanklės, with snippets from 13th-century Persian lyrics for a musing on perception and appearances (“Not all sugarcanes have sugar/Not all those who wander are lost/Not all eyes possess a vision”) and existentialism (“you are not a drop in the ocean/You are the entire ocean, in a drop”), noting that “the only constant is change in this world”).
Incorporating field recordings from the foothills of what once was Plymouth Castle and a Monmartran busker, Castles By The Sea, which features adapted words from the Henry Longfellow poem of the same name, is a meditation on nature and time (“I saw the moon above it standing/I thought I heard a chime/But the sound of leading forth in rupture/Is just old turning eyes of mine”) set to an electronic ambient backdrop, an excerpt from Tree Goods Luck by Guy Andrews.
He draws on Devonian history for two tracks in particular. The Gatehouse, lyrics researched and co-written with Wood, again featuring Karaliute and the vocals recorded at Lydford Jail and around Tavistock, is a rewriting of the myths surrounding Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond and Somerset whom Stacey notes “up to this point has had only had fictitious verse written and sung about her as a notorious and ghostly figure which is very far from the truth.” In the song, Stacey short-circuits the legend that, as a punishment for having supposedly poisoned all her four husbands, her ghost was condemned to make an endless journey from the jailhouse in a coach of bones pulled by four horses and led by a large black dog with red eyes (“This journey’s done/After hundreds of miles/She’s coming home”).
Feast Or Fire was partly recorded at Brentor on Dartmoor and in Brentor church, which has folklore associations with the Devil, Old Hugh and Saint Michael. Played on strummed octave mandolin with its “double-edged sword” ambiguity lyrics, it is also the most radio-friendly cut with its insistent driving bassline rhythm, tempo shifts, hook refrain and Stacey’s direct, occasionally echoing vocals.
Also anchored in Devon is the other Wood co-write, the pulsing Song of The Moor. Adapted from the words collected by Sabine Baring-Gould, it is driven here by bodhran and guitar, an evocation of the landscape and nature’s bounty (“Never pay a farthing/For all that we require/On all sides this is yours”) that incorporates birdsong and, at its close, the tap of a woodpecker.
And so it ends with the second spoken passage, Lost Prayer, based on Prayer by John Masefield (“When the last field is reaped/And the last harvest stored/Will you hear one last prayer/So the lost, will find home, once more”) and accompanied by piano, fiddle (playing what sounds like an Irish traditional), street field recordings and departing footstep. It’s an album that repays repeated plays to dig into the weft and weave of his musical textures and discover the pull of these lost places.
Postcards from Lost Places (7th February 2025) Self Released
Bandcamp: https://colestacey.bandcamp.com/album/postcards-from-lost-places
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