New Music 2018 - Part 11 - Midnight Skyracer - Fire

Even in this somewhat enlightened age all-female professional bluegrass bands are something of a rarity.
In so as far as I am aware the very first was New York based five-piece 'Buffalo Gals'. In 1974 it released an album 'First Born(e)' - the actual spelling depends on whether you are looking at the front or reverse of the album sleeve(!) - on Revonah Records as 12" vinyl RS-913 and that I have. It cost more to transport and import than its purchase price but I knew that would be the case. It was well worth it.

Fast-forward forty-four years and become acquainted with Midnight Skyracer. Five young women none of whom call the USA home; four are from England and the other from Ireland. Bluegrass has blossomed far and wide these last few years.

Charlotte Carrivick - guitars
Eleanor Wilkie - upright bass
Laura Carrivick - fiddle
Leanne Thorose - mandolin
Tabitha Agnew - banjo

All of them contribute vocals on the album.

Midnight Skyracer - Fire (SKY001, 2 February 2018).

Midnight Skyracer - Fire:

• Fuel to My Fire
• Susan Anna Gal
• Working Girl Blues
• Virginia Rose
• So Long, Goodbye, We're Through
• They Want to Go
• Spinous Shark
• A Little Luck
• Sitting Alone in the Moonlight
• High and Dry

The covers are handled beautifully; Hazel Dickens' composition Working Girl Blues being a splendid case in point, but the original songs and their tunes certainly live up to the company in which they find themselves.

To give you an idea of what to expect should you see them live here is a song that isn't actually on the album at all. 

It is a cover of 'I'm Just Here to Ride The Train' by Mountain Heart from that band's 2006 album 'Wide Open'.

Other acts that feature these artists (an incomplete list):
Cardboard Fox

Carrivick Sisters
Cup O'Joe
Kieran Towers and Charlotte Carrivick

Just today, this:
https://www.facebook.com/midnightskyracer/videos/2004970373056156/

The song 'Virginia Rose' is a co-write by Tabitha Agnew and Laura Carrivick.

My Music in 2014 - EPs and mini albums

Just four out of so many possibilities are included in this list but there could always be a 'part 2'. These are not in alphabetical order either but rather in ascending order of the number of times I think that have listened to them since I came to be aware/it was released and this is not adjusted for the time factor in each case - I don't keep statistics in that detail.  It is also less influenced by that which I have seen live but I have designs on that too.

• Aimée - Codes

Originally the solo project of Aimée Mackenzie from Liphook, Hampshire, Codes is the latest EP and one on which she has been joined by younger siblings Freya (violin and backing vocals)  and Ross (cajón).

The first Aimée LP should appear sometime in 2015 and this is not only something I look forward to because I have never seen this outfit live either. It should not be a problem; Aimée is announced to play at Behind the Castle Festival, Sherborne, Dorset on 13 June 2015. Their music while predominantly acoustic is really quite a challenge to categorize, which is no bad thing I hasten to add, for it jumps styles and genres between, and sometimes even during, songs.

• Cardboard Fox - Cardboard Fox

This is the most recently released of the four in this list and it is a début release of kinds - three of the four members of this acoustic quartet have featured in these pages as the still fully functioning Carrivick Sisters - Charlotte and Laura Carrivick and John Breese are joined by Joe Tozer on mandolin and acoustic guitar in Cardboard Fox.

Still very much folk based and with self-penned songs this is rather less heavily bluegrass influenced than the Carrivick Sisters' recordings.

• The Black Feathers - Strangers We Meet

This is a duo that I have seen live twice in 2014 and I'm planning on making that three times at Nunney Acoustic Café later this week.

I'm rather hoping that Gloucestershire-based Ray Hughes and Sian Chandler's Strangers We Meet EP might presage, in a wholly good way however, an album sooner rather than later. I just have a feeling that it could be the start of something big. 

The Black Feathers, Cheese and Grain, Frome, 24 October 2014.

I have, unusually for me, chosen three acts based more or less in central southern England here. This next, although I was alerted to it by Folk Radio UK, comprises three young ladies from thousands of miles away.

• Free The Honey - In Our Hands

Free The Honey is from Gunnison in the high mountains of western Colorado, USA. 

This EP had, in so far as I was aware until this week, no physical release and so it marked a rare foray into downloads as far I am concerned. 

This it seems is not true any longer. The rest of this shop looks fascinating too!

That it is my most played EP or mini-album of 2014 says a great deal. As I mentioned back in June it is a delight of unexpected twists and  turns. At seven tracks it is the only one in this list that truly counts as a mini-album although as strictly-defined EPs should have only three, not more or less, and all the above fail on that criterion: Strangers We Meet has five and the other two four tracks each. The really key thing and I think it important to the renaissance of EPs and mini albums in the last several years, is that there is no need for filler. New music, even just a small body of work, can be made available in a physical format, as well as on-line, as a unified whole far sooner and at less cost than heretofore.

Carrivick Sisters - Live @ The Lights, Andover

Yesterday evening I thought it might be time to start October as I mean to go on, with live music. I have been intending to see a full set from Bath-based Carrivick Sisters for far too long and The Lights, a small council run arts venue in Andover, is barely an hour down the road. With its adjacent free parking and easy access from home it is less trouble than attending an event in Bath and, even more so, Bristol.
Yesterday the sisters; Charlotte (guitar, banjo and mandolin) and Laura (fiddle, dobro and guitar) were joined by John Breeze on bass.  They started the set without John singing 'You'll Miss Her When You're Gone' a capella.

The balance of their extensive set, which in the absence of a support act was divided in to two parts, featured songs from their most recent LP 'Over The Edge' 2013 with a couple of traditional songs (most LP songs are self-penned) and a couple from 2011 LP 'From The Fields' including sing-a-long encore 'Today Is A Good Day'.

The sisters sing harmony vocals as well as share lead vocal duties.

They finished the set with a tune, 'Pig In The Middle'.

New Music - Part 21 - Up-coming UK folk

To be quite honest my in-box is overflowing with new things that I want to mention, hence two posts in successive days and the likelihood of several more to come before the end of this coming weekend. In contrast to yesterday's post these are all forthcoming albums and are not the début ones from the artists concerned.

This first, Over the Edge - The Carrivick Sisters, is not actually released until October 4, 2013 (physically on CD as a six-panel cardboard digi-file with lyric booklet).

If you can't wait until the release date then I suggest you check out its predecessor, From the Fields (2011), which I mentioned specifically for the song 'Charlotte Dymond'. While that one is essentially in the UK folk tradition much of this album, and I strongly suspect the new one too, happily borrows from other roots music in particular that of Appalachian and bluegrass.
Over the Edge consists of nine original songs, two original instrumentals and one traditional song. The track listing is below:

• Over the Edge
• If You Asked Me
• The Moon
• I Know You
• Making Horses
• Outside Time
• Lady Howard
• Pretty Fair Damsel
• Man in the Corner
• Old Friend
• Slap on Eleven
• Bird

If you sign up to their e-newsletter here then you can grab yourself a very good deal pre-ordering the album on CD [4 July - this offer has now ended]. Recording and releasing an album doesn't come cheap and many of the costs come up front.

The next two releases come courtesy of Navigator Records; the first is the second LP by Derbyshire singer-songwriter Lucy Ward. Her first LP, Adelphi Has To Fly, was released by Navigator Records on June 13, 2011. The next, Single Flame, is released on August 19, 2013.

Once again it combines the new and traditional, but...

If there is one single thing that makes me regret the cancellation of Frome Folk Festival 2013 it is that she was one of the confirmed artists for it. No artist wants seemingly confirmed bookings cancelled, for that matter, and I hope Frome can make it up to her in due course.

This next is from Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker; new to the Navigator Records fold with their album Fire & Fortune that is scheduled for release on July 22, 2013.

That said, if you haven't experienced the delights of their previous releases such as the Homemade Heartache EP (2012) or the albums, The Seas Are Deep and One Light Is Gone, then you already have a whole new world to discover.

Murderous, Modern and Urban?

Much has been written, and much more doubtless will be, about the corrasion (rather than mere corrosion) of some modern 'urban' music and in particular that it dwells heavily on themes of injustice, death, violence, and murder.

That is true but equally it is nothing new - the folk canon is replete with such themes in all forms --- from the night songs (of lovers lost) to the murder ballads in which the boot is on the other foot.  The stories are often old, the telling of them not always so much so:
  
Charlotte Dymond
In early April
1844
I heard you talking
By the barn door
You agreed to go with him
To a church upon the moor
You planned to leave me
You'd be mine no more
  
Two years I loved you
Two years you were mine
I swore I'd love you
Until the end of time
But now you've found a new love
You crossed the line
Oh what have I done
I'll hang for my crime
  
You went walking up on Bodmin
An early start that day
Never said where you were going
But I could walk with you some of the way
Well you never reached that chapel
You never got away
For by the stream I killed you
And there I hoped you'd stay
  
On my return I told the others
New work you had found
They did not believe me
And with your absence I was bound
Oh, curse you Charlotte Dymond
Where you lay on the ground
For along with my boot prints
Your body was found
  
I tried to hide it
Tried to save my own skin
But the Mistress turned against me
With all her kith and kin
I know that I must suffer
For this dreadful sin
Now the gallows await me
Hell's gate says welcome in.
  
Lyric: Charlotte Carrivick (2011), based on traditional sources including the twenty-three four-line verses of Charles Causley's 'The Ballad of Charlotte Dymond'.  Fiddle and backing vocals: Laura Carrivick.
Matthew Weekes was convicted of the murder of Charlotte Dymond and was sentenced to death by hanging. This took place in Plymouth.