Seafaring tales... and two contrasting albums.

Wildwood Jack - Liberty Ship (self-released, 1 March 2018)

The first, and the most recently released, deserves my attention. It is a work of entirely original songwriting and the theme is nautical to a fault. It is in great part the work of a duo based in Kent, UK; Jayne Freeman (vocals, ukulele) and Adam Piggott (acoustic guitar) but of course there is judicious use of additional artists when greater depth or diversity is required. Liam Genocky plays percussion throughout.
The songs on it are as follows:

Widwood Jack - Liberty Ship:

• An Ordinary Day
• The Captain and Me
• The Lost Gypsy
• Morning Star
• Just a Dreamer
• Man Overboard
• By the Light of This Lantern
• Unsinkable Sam
• Liberty Ship
• Bluegrass Boy
• Montgomery Canal

It is nevertheless a fairly stripped back affair and that works very well here in my opinion. It is solid throughout but one of the highlights is the story of a ship's cat 'Unsinkable Sam'; in fact one cat, capital ships sunk by both sides, in a war and the survivor of three sinkings.
The last track is a trip far from the storm-tossed briny waters. It has reminded me that, now that I think about it, I can't recall many songs about canals and other inland waterways. This is one that comes to mind because I mentioned it last year.

The second LP in this post is quite a different affair. For a start all the songs are traditional or, if not exactly however that may be defined, are certainly not original to the band. Many of them may be familiar to you from bands such as The Dubliners as well as many more.  Some of it is bawdy. A particular mention here must go to the song 'Blow The Man Down' which is explicitly about the dangers to a feckless man of attempting to take advantage of a Plymouth girl!

Admirals Hard - Upon A Painted Ocean (Genepool Records/Believers Roast BR018, 22 July 2016).

Admirals Hard - Upon A Painted Ocean

• Boney Was a Warrior
• Spanish Ladies
• Hullabaloo Belay
• South Australia
• Blow the Man Down
• The Broadside Man
• The Eddystone Light
• The Random Jig / I'll Get Wedded in My Auld Claes
• Whip Jamboree / Let the Bulgine Run
• Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her
• Rounding the Horn
• All for Me Grog
• Martin Said to His Man

This is an almost acoustic seven-piece band but is actually a side project of musicians,  from Devon and Cornwall, that mostly ply their daily trade in the left-field electronic music scene of London. It is what happened when they decided to get together and do something completely different with their many and varied talents. There are certainly some progressive flourishes herein but then folk music was never intended to be set in stone.
I wouldn't wish to venture my favourites here, because they keep changing, except to say that Whip Jamboree/Let the Bulgine Run will always be on it. This may be because, unlike most of the other songs and tunes here, they were totally new to me when I first heard them on this recording. I must seek other versions of them but I have not got around to so doing yet.

Unusual song covers.

Once upon a time I had mixed feelings about an artist covering the songs of another artist. I can't actually remember why I felt that way but I got over it a long time ago. It is, of course, the staple diet of the very many talent contests on TV but that has hardly encouraged me. On the other hand my most recent post mentioned only covered songs and that I suppose made has made me think about the subject yet again. That is in a sense driven by the fact that Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's '1989' in toto actually didn't spark that response because I have worked through my thoughts on that territory before.
This is one by an artist, Natalie Prass, that I saw live this summer, and mentioned, with a song I might not have imagined her taking on. Let's see how this turns out.  She is covering a song in an entirely different genre to her own and one that was first released in the year she was born.

Here she covers Slayer and 'Raining Blood' from the 1986 album 'Reign In Blood'.

You may like neither version one little bit but I contend that it was an interesting, and even braver, choice.

Regina Spektor - 'Songs'

She is a classically trained pianist, of Russian background and New York sensibility, who might prove a surprise hit in 2007. UK radio (not least the once unmentionable BBC Radio 2) has been playing, mostly by popular request, her new single 'Fidelity'. Released on 5th March 2007, both on 7" vinyl and CD, it is taken from the album Begin To Hope (2006) on the cover of which she appears kittenish.

She was not so coy on the cover of her first studio album. Soviet Kitsch was released in 2004.

This was not her first CD release either!

In the 1980s the US was the source of many a female singer songwriter, and they made a big impact on the UK charts as well, but almost all of them primarily wrote on guitar.
More recently they have rather been few and far between, but some have written on piano and still reached the UK charts. The track 'A Thousand Miles', a huge hit in the US and UK from her 2003 début album Be Not Nobody, makes Vanessa Carlton a good case in point. Some songs on Songs have a resonance with those but equally fellow New Yorker Vanessa Carlton's second album, the hugely under-rated Harmonium (2005), indicates that the influences might actually cut both ways.

The tracks on Songs are not accompanied by complex orchestrations...
On Christmas Day 2001, in New York and with Joe Mendelson as recording engineer, Regina Spektor recorded seventeen tracks. Every one was done in a single live take and they were originally intended to be an archive session but in 2002 she was persuaded to release many of them, exactly as they were recorded, on a CD that was however only available at her live shows in 2003/4...

... Songs (2002) is amazing - it is well worth any effort it takes to find.

It consists of twelve tracks; about half of them are piano led and most of the others are largely constructed around judicious overdubs and in that respect she is quite reminiscent of Camille Dalmais - and neither of them suffers one bit from the comparison.

There is a very diffuse genre of music currently known as 'anti-folk' and these two artists both seem to represent it. So does Rose Kemp and I can see that this is indeed true as she, while largely guitar led, is also a user of self-made overdubs. On the other hand, while quite obviously related in her use of vocal overdubs, KT Tunstall never seems to mentioned in this respect but both Lily Allen (who doesn't for the most part) and Kate Nash (who very often does) both seem to be included as a matter of right! Some reviewers say that Regina Spektor has abandoned her anti-folk past on this album, but I don't hear it.
'Samson', the third track on Begin To Hope, is also the first on Songs and while she has certainly moved on it would be hard to claim that she has sold out. She is now signed to WEA, and yes the production is rather less lo-fi, but I'd say that her new (major) label have made most of the compromises because the new 'Samson' is still quite recognizably the same song.
If anything at all defines 'anti-folk' as a distinct category - and I have no problem with any of it - its subtle derivation from punk, mostly in terms of lyrical narrative rather than the music itself, is perhaps the key.

KT Tunstall applied many of the same ideas and tools to the modern folk-influenced scene, which was a different achievement entirely, and her début album Eye To The Telescope released in December 2004 sold over a million copies in the UK alone in 2005!