First Quarter Report # 1:

Sarah Louise, Sally Anne Morgan 

& Kryssi B. –

NATCH 11: Earth Cult d/l

(Black Dirt Studios)

Anything featuring guitarist Kryssi Battalene (Mountain Movers / Headroom) immediately earns a spot on my “to listen” list, and though this collaborative album recorded with two members of the band Home and Land (with whose work I am unfamiliar) feels like a bit of an outlier within her catalogue, it’s still a more substantive and rewarding work than its ostensible status as an unplanned / off-the-cuff “hey, why don’t you guys get together and do some recording and I’ll put them on bandcamp” type affair may suggest.

What we’re essentially hearing here, I think, is the sound of two factions moving beyond their respective comfort zones, meeting somewhere in the middle, looking around at the curious landscape of an area which neither of them have really explored before and… I dunno, building a nice treehouse together, I suppose.

So, Louise and Morgan range out beyond (what I assume to be) the more conventional, song-based folk of their own groups, embracing a woozier, more free-form approach, whilst Battalene for her part nixes the PSF-styled noise-rock maximalism of her playing in the aforementioned bands, instead threading her way into the gentler, more delicate fabric favoured by her collaborators. Applying a variety of more intuitive and low-key guitar/effects treatments to the tracks here, she helps bring the underlying psychedelia of the enterprise simmering nicely to the surface, finally breaking out with some tormented, dissonant racket towards the end of the track-list, on what is probably my favourite track here, the mantra-like forest mulch trip-out of ‘Emerald Ash’.

Prior to that however, beautiful heavy tremolo strumming adds shimmering depths to the otherwise fairly trad country-folk of ‘Gathering’, whilst strange, throbbing delay pedal conjurations provide an ominous bed for ‘Squash Vine’s similarly healthy, no nonsense indie-folk take on free-from jamming, allowing it to grow into something rather spectacular across its six minute duration - a winning combo of elements repeated on the record’s slightly more tangible centre-piece, ‘Cherry Tree Carol’, whose mix of earnest, trad-arr vocal recital and more rock inclined backing might perhaps strike a distant chord with fans of Shirley Collins & The Albion Country Band’s revered ‘No Roses’.

Indeed, as is nigh-on inevitable for this kind of acoustic/electric, folk/psych type venture, the trio touch upon some familiar, leaf n’ bramble-strewn ground over the course of these seven cuts, fleetingly sharing shadows with some of my own old faves of yesteryear. A whiff of early Charalambides can definitely be discerned in the more abstract, unglued moments (the ominous, wordless vocalisations of opener ‘Skullcap’ and closer ‘Five’, for instance), although the feel here is thankfully way looser and less buttoned up than the Carters’ 21st century work. Elsewhere, instrumental textures (particularly Louise & Morgan’s harmonium and bowed string work) often touch upon the East-West drone alchemy of Pelt, and the picked opening riff of ‘Two’ even momentarily recalls that of Heron Oblivion’s ‘Beneath Fields’… but we needn’t make a fuss about it.

The crucial thing here in fact is that none of these comparison points really take hold for more than a few seconds at a time, and, despite the somewhat hesitant / open-ended nature of this collaboration, the three players succeed in establishing a compelling identity for themselves across these recordings, with each of the seven tracks achieving a sense of hypnotic intensity and a dark-eyed clarity of purpose often lacking from these kind of neo-hippy jam scene ventures. In fact, the whole damn thing is so flat-out wonderful, showcasing such rich, collective promise, it already has me hoping the participants might consider extending their collaboration into a more permanent, on-going band type arrangement.

Released on a digital-only basis by the New York based Black Dirt Studio label, all proceeds earned from bandcamp sales of this album will go “..to the Amazon Conservation Team, who partners with indigenous people to protect the rainforest and their rights”, which I’m sure we can all agree is admirable. I made sure to accelerate it to the front of the queue of records I wish to write about this month furthermore, simply because this everybody-wins exchange of money for mp3 files will only be available to us punters until March 1st 2020, at which point it will be withdrawn from sale, and a shorter, five track version will be made available free of charge. So, if this stuff sounds remotely like your cup of gently spiked herbal tea, please make sure you get in quick and do the decent thing.