Fact
This is a stand-out folk album from 2017, and actually just
a stand-out album. Chris Wood does occupy a noticeably formal and traditional
place within the folk genre, but he nonetheless manages to make it completely
fresh and apt in a way the paradoxes within this sentence won’t if it is
over-analysed, or maybe even just read a second time. My apologies. What I mean
is I hear folk tropes in obvious ways as with 1887 [though the piano is an askance instrument] and in the absolutely
stunning, beautiful closer You May Stand
Mute. Opener So Much to Defend is
rich in its Martyn-esque pickandslap guitar work, so in a sense a more modern
folk grope [‘modern’ being a relative term here], the narrative itself
referencing ‘Skype’ so a genuinely updated mention, and the ‘Ebbsfleet’ FC mention
a bit of grounding news. There’s Hammond organ in the This Love Won’t Let You Fail to broaden the folksiness outwards –
another beautiful song – and the horn/s in Strange
Cadence a jazz inflection to make the listening pleasure fulsome.
Quite a brilliant album, in fact.
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