Reviews
Jim Ghedi Album: Death of Robin Hood Soundtrack
Label: A24
Tracks: 14
Website: https://www.jimghedi.com/
Wisps of mist drag across a spent battlefield, snagging on the murder of crows and looters who pluck eyeballs and wedding rings from the savaged fallen. Above the carnage, a glowering sky threatens to flush the blood from the up-turned sod below. An ominous sense of foreboding, still hanging in the air, suggests the tragedy is far from over.
So apt is Jim Ghedi's recent style of contemporary gothic folk music it almost feels like Michael Sarnoski's 2026 medieval movie epic 'Death of Robin Hood' is a film designed to fit the music rather than the other way round.
And yet only after the film was shot and in its post-production stage did someone in Sarnoski's team discover Sheffield's rising star Jim Ghedi and his 2025 album 'Wasteland' released on Basin Rock Records. I can only imagine how excited the much-feted film director must have been when the discovery was made.
Jim Ghedi's consequent soundtrack for the film involves a few adapted songs from 'Wasteland' (some of which are classic English folk songs reimagined) plus music composed specifically for the film but drawn from the same palette of troubled violins, keening cellos, battle-cry voice, marching drums and droning harmonium that the album draws from.
I've been to see Jim Ghedi live as a quartet twice this year and it's remarkable how he can conjour this level of swirling epic in an old social club in Hackney. But conjour it he can. And Ghedi took time off from his live tour promoting 'Wasteland' over the last year to answer Sarnoski's phone call and subsequently compose his first ever movie soundtrack.
The result is as much a time machine as it is an album. You can be doing the washing-up on a Monday evening with headphones on and, within eight bars of track one, the smoking battlegrounds of the English Civil War stretch before you with burning barns pulsing in the orange fog. And what's more, the boring pile of greasy pots and pans which stood between me and a rich experience got done without me really noticing. Transported I was.
Jim Carey
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The Death Of Robin Hood
Fatea Showcase Sessions
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