Reviews
Artist:Ruth Angell Album: Hylwing
Label: Talking Elephant
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.ruthangell.com/
Classically trained at Birmingham Conservatoire as a violinist and composer and a regular collaborator with Ashley Hutchings, Angell's latest album, featuring contributions from Sid Peacock, Spencer Cozens and Steve Tromans among others, takes its title from an old English word for shelter and refuge and takes inspiration from the wonders of nature and the landscapes she's encountered.
The dreamy, strings-swathed opening track 'Castle On The Hill' has her visiting Riber Castle, a 19th-century country house on a hill overlooking Matlock, conjuring memories of returning home to pastoral calm and the cry of curlews after the bustle of the city. Another building, this time in Bangor, is the setting for equally serene 'The Boathouse' with its rippling synths, electric piano and strings, the line "it's not quite Gran Canaria Mum" something her young son remarked as the Irish weather did its windy and rainy best.
A child is also the inspiration for 'Little Boy Blue', specifically Alan Kurdi, the two year old Syrian refugee who drowned as his family attempted to reach the coast of Greece ("laid on the sand/All for the lack of an/Outstretched hand"), a symbol of all children who fall victim to an uncaring world, rippling guitar and piano notes conjuring the motion of waves, the song ending with a particularly poignant reference to the children's nursery rhyme of the title.
Commissioned by Belfast's Eastside Arts Festival, again arranged around strings, guitar and piano, 'Shipyard Fairy' is a setting of the poem by shipyard worker and Orangeman Thomas Carnduff, originally featured on the 2019 Peacock Angell mini-album Songs Of The Shipyard. A second poem arrives later with the last wishes of Christina Rosetti's 'No Roses', set to music with Peacock's strings arrangement and Tromans delicate piano providing the lengthy introduction, the song itself played at Angell's grandmother's funeral.
Anchored by a pulsing acoustic guitar line Angell's son gets another shout out with the gently soaring 'Little Bird', a song written for and about him when he was still small, the lyrics inspired by coming face to face with a barn owl while driving back home from a gig. Taking a more musically uptempo path with rolling drums, double bass and chiming guitar, 'Treasure' uses the small pebble she keeps in her pocket as a comfort stone as a metaphor for valuing beauty in the small things in life and treasuring those we hold close, the lyrics containing obscure allusions to James and the Giant Peach, the Derbyshire cooling towers, and her mother's knitted bikini.
Along with the poems, there's also a cover, violin viola, and cello caressing Joni Mitchell's 'Magdalene Laundries', a song commemorating the many unfortunate unmarried pregnant, 'fallen'; or simply rebellious Irish women who were consigned to these cruel institutions purporting to be places of sanctuary, the hlywing of the album's title.
Having opened with a local castle, adopting strident ringing guitar folk rock, it draws to a close with a local pub, the 'Three Stags' (more specifically The Three Stags' Heads) at Wardlow Mires in the Derbyshire Dales, a gloomy hostelry frequented with her father in her younger days and populated, she recalls, by intimidating (to a teenage girl) old men, such as one Harry Wardlow who would pointedly sharpen his hunting knife if anyone started talking politics, the song dedicated to the late landlord, Geoff Fuller, who would tell you to "fuck off" if you dared order a lager. No doubt her trepidation was exacerbated by the fact that, as she details, the pub was sited near Gibbert Rock where local criminals and suspected witches would be hanged.
It ends 'In The Vale Of Contemplation', a lovely violin, grand piano and organ elegy for lost loved ones and celebration of the power and wonder of nature that "brings me to my knees", a sentiment you may wish to echo on listening to this wonderful album.
Mike Davies
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Castle On The Hill
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