Reviews
Meadowsuite Album: Meadowsuite
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 12
Website: https://meadowsuite.bandcamp.com/
An Oxford-based quartet punningly named for the wildflower and comprising George Gurden and guitar, cittern and banjo, flautist May Tumi, cellist Lizzie Cheetham, all three providing vocals and Claire Robertson on violin, they play self-penned, traditional styled folk with jaunty melodies even if the lyrics are sometimes not as cheerful.
Tumi on lead and with an opening line adapted from a Caliban speech in The Tempest, 'Bubbles Of Earth' is a celebration of being one with nature ("We're bubbles of earth as we float along the breeze/Morning breaks through curtains drawn, full of warmth and hope to harness/Stepping to with springing feet, and looking back to see no darkness/A carpet of flowers we rest upon with ease/A river of calm, through a meadow of mirth"), As the title suggests, written and sung by Gurden, 'Gravedigger' is less cheery with its contemplation of mortality ("Some will say that when you die you'll be measured for your worth/be it paradise or the precipice for your time upon this earth/While others say it's the blank malaise of the nothing before your birth/All will say it's your fate to lay six feet beneath the earth") and the sage observation that "the only road that really counts is the one not taken yet")
Written and sung by Cheetham, with banjo, violin and flute, 'Frideswide', for those not up on ecclesiastical history, is named for and tells of the English princess, abbess and saint credited as the founder of a monastery later incorporated into Christ Church, Oxford who, as the song recounts, fled from Algar, king of Leicester, who attempted to abduct he when she refused to marry him. She ended up in Oxford where he was struck blind and she "caused a magic well to spring up from the ground, whose waters brought healing to many ills around". It plays out with the traditional tune 'Rose in the Heather'.
It's Gurden's turn with historical maidens on 'Rosamund the Fair' which, set to a circling guitar line, violin andf pulsing cello and sung by Tumi, concerns Rosamund Clifford, an English noblewoman who became mistress to Henry II apparently dying of natural causes before she was 40. No so here though, as Gurden has her murdered on orders of a cold-hearted Queen Eleanor.
Murder ballad out pf the way, things proceed with Tum's jazzy pizzicato 'Rhythm of the Moon' about an enigmatic volatile free spirit ("she'll carry you when you need to floatbut she can drown you in the very next stroke…you think you know her well but she's deeper than you ever can tell") who's "herself and that's all she needs to be".
It's back to history and legend with Gurden's sprightly strummed 'Once and Future King' which, borrowing the title from T.H.White, is of course about Arthur and the promise "to return again when the need was most profound", though, with Tumi on harmonies, is actually about having to pin your colours to the mast rather than rely on some mythical saviour ("don't fall into the trap of thinking all the world's the same/That what's come before shall come again and you'll never see the change/'Cos giving up's a losing game/If innocence is the first to die, then hope shall be the last/The future's always coming as today becomes the Past").
Cheetham's second contribution is the violin and flute-coloured fingerpicked, courtly-sounding 'Ghost Song' which leans into the traditional theme of a murdered by a rival in love who now haunts the grove where he was supposed to meet his beloved.' Then comes more folklore legend as, sung by Tumi with discordant refrain and arranged for cittern, pulsing cello and shaker, Gurden adds his pennyworth to the Hagley Hall mystery of 'Bella in the Wych Elm', hewing to suggestions that, her body found in a hollowed tree in 1943, she was a Nazi spy, a murdered prostitute or the victim of a coven's ritual.
Gurden takes lead on his own 'The Storm Within', a vague cocktail of McTell and Dylan about nature calming the "tempest grown inside your breast" when you have to "slave all day to build a roof/To keep the rain from off your head" and that eventually it will clear ("I can see it's a brand new day/At long last I can see the sky/The wind has blown the clouds away").
Another combination of song and traditional tune from Cheetham, the folksier, lilting 'The Sea Song/Out on the Ocean' is a shanty of sorts that conjures memories of childhood "going down/A path paved with boroughs and stanleys" for a day by the sea and then returning later ("Breathing heavy salty sage and thyme/With our feet sore and sodden we'll reach solid ground/But we're bitten and scratched from our journey back"), interpolated with the flute and violin instrumental break.
Tumi tales lead on the final cuts, the penultimate track being Gurden's 'The Rise and Fall' returning to pastoral notes ("The April fool is in the street, where the merry fellows meet/To hang the ribbons on the willow tree/The swifts are on the wing, where the black bird proudly sings/The summers painted on the sovereign sky/The cat lies sleeping in the sun, till the hazy day is done") as the seasons change ("The wind slashes in my face, as the leaves fall out of place/The sky is heavy as the earth goes to sleep/The autumns in the orchard, see the apples steady fall/A cavern pumpkin where the morning mist creeps/ Hooded figures round a fire, glowing embers light their smiles").
And finally, chorus by Tumi and lyrics taken from Walt De La Mare's poem 'Music', 'When Music Sounds (Hey hey hey)' sends things off with another love letter to the transformative power of nature and music of the wind through the trees ("When music sounds, gone is the earth I know/And all her lovely things even lovelier grow…And from Time's woods break into distant song/The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along"). Were old Walt around today, I reckon he'd want this album in his collection.
Mike Davies
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