Ange Hardy - Esteesee, album review

Beautiful and Empathetic Homage

This is an interesting album – engagingly so for its research; strangely so for its dipping in and out of its admittedly informed and empathetic range – but it is certainly musically beautiful in its folk charm, though there are narratives too, like Tamsin Rosewell’s Kubla Khan, an earnest reading with classically English folk music [recorder] as a backdrop, a nod to its writer more, obviously, than the exotic location and descriptions of its poetic world.

The Curse of the Dead Man’s Eye opens with a gruffly spoken extract from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner before segueing into a sweet folk song with its chorus gorgeously singing its oxymoronic lines,

All in a hot and a copper sky
Parched only dust in my lungs so dry,
I drink of the blood from my arms to cry
for the curse of a dead man’s eye.

and William Frend [the social reformer] reflects STC’s philosophy - at one point in his life – with we stand as equal men…so rise and stand for liberty, this too a pretty folk song with lovely vocal harmonies.

There are songs that reflect STC’s [yes, that’s the title Esteesee…] love of the outdoors and walking, like Friends of Three evoking the friendship of William and Dorothy Wordsworth with Samuel, and even more literally in Along the Coleridge Way.

Within this there are similar folk captures of other aspects of STC’s life, like George about STC’s older brother, Pantisocracy to reflect STC’s idealised if short-lived world imagined with friend Robert Southey, and Epitaph on an Infant, the poem set to more sweetly apt music,

Ere sin could blight or Sorrow fade
Death came with friendly care
The opening bud to Heaven conveyed
And bade it blossom there

This lovely bud, so young so fair,
Called hence by early doom,
Just came to show how sweet a flower
In paradise would bloom.

The music stands entirely on its own as beautifully crafted folk, another fine example being the song Esteesee with its emotive choric rises and plaintive violin, and the album ends on the Hardy homage Elegy for Coleridge which uses elements of STC’s  own epitaph,

Each is the life the Lord has made
And each from the womb of a mother came
All who live will go by grave
As all who fall before thee.

Come pray that he who toils of breath
As death in life finds life in death
Ask and hope through Christ in rest
As he who falls before thee.

Each is a day the Lord has made
And each with the mother of my children paved
Each of our boys both bright and brave
Two sons and one fine daughter.

Come Pray that he who toils of breath
As death in life finds life in death
Ask and hope through Christ in rest
As he who falls before thee.

Each is the hour the Lord has made
And each with my brother is a joyous trade
Mine mere words where his are ways
Two sons and one as father.

Come pray that he who toils of breath
As death in life finds life in death
Ask and hope through Christ in rest
As he who falls before thee.

Come pray that he who toils of breath
As death in life finds life in death
Ask and hope through Christ in rest
As he who falls before thee.