Crafting For Foes
Album: Borrowed Ground EP
Label: Moth House
Tracks: 5
Website: http://www.craftingforfoes.com

Crafting For Foes is Adam Rees and Amanda McManus, who formed as a duo in 2010; they’ve recently collaborated with the re-formed Owl Service at Leigh-on-Sea’s Midwinter Folk Festival. Surprisingly, they’ve eluded my radar thus far, to the extent that Borrowed Ground is already their third EP release.

It’s a collection of traditional English folksongs reworked in a gentle, genial and distinctively English styling that has a certain kinship with some of those just-under-the-ground early-70s outfits like Dulcimer, BLD and Stone Breath but arguably even more of a correspondence with the sound of Basket-Of-Light-era Pentangle (notably on the eerie Bonny Boy).

Instrumentally, it’s a sparse but effective texture, with Adam sparingly supplying almost all of the instrumentation – guitar, tenor guitar, banjo, bass, violin and mandolin; Amanda takes up the glockenspiel, Fran Morter brings her flute into the studio just briefly, and there’s a tiny modicum of uncredited percussion here and there.

Lead vocals are shared out more or less evenly between Amanda and Adam; Amanda’s banjo-flecked take on North Country Maid is especially winning, and Adam makes a good fist of Master Kilby and The Little Room, while Diana Collier provides some guest vocals. Only the opening track, The Begging Song, feels perhaps just a tad routine in the company of the four tracks that succeed it, but overall this is a convincing foray into English tradition in the approved slightly-acid/goth style.

David Kidman