Emily Portman
Album: Coracle
Label: Furrow
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.emilyportman.co.uk

Emily was initially catapulted onto the folk scene almost a decade ago with Lauren McCormick and Jim Causley in the marvellous trio The Devil's Interval. However, her personal creativity has since pursued a more determinedly individual course, producing a pair of truly distinctive solo albums (The Glamoury and Hatchling, the latter the proud recipient of a BBC Folk Award) that have been right up there with the best of contemporary tradition-influenced wyrd-folk.

Album number three, Coracle, develops that strand of Emily's sensibility which enables her deep-rooted response to folk-traditional form and subject-matter (notably nature in all its manifestations) to inform the voicing in song of her own thoughts and reflections on important issues of life, death, love and loss - especially the generation (in the literal sense) of life through the creative act of motherhood and all the contradictory experiences that it brings. Coracle marks a departure from Emily's previous records in that all its songs (apart from High Tide, which sports a specially-composed lyric by poet Eleanor Rees) are from Emily's own pen. As often as not, though, the spirit of tradition infuses both phrasing and wording in the context of a hazily-recalled collective memory that's almost a stream-of-consciousness flowing from an aspect of that tradition. Check out songs such as Brink Of June, Eye Of Tree and Seed Stitch, and the Cruel Mother-ballad-like Borrowed And Blue in particular, and you can't fail to hear what I mean.

The whole of this new album can also be seen as a continuance of Emily's personal tradition too, not least in that it inhabits her now-trademark sound world, where her deceptively softly voiced delivery is placed within limpid and highly imaginative musical settings to express telling, darkly mysterious, often elusive and decidedly enigmatic imagery. Unsettling (and unexpected) juxtapositions can occur too, as on the opening song, whose dark, threatening, admonitory central images ("the crow's bark is tolling a darkening bell", "the Hill King crouches waiting …beckons with nails made of iron" and grim exhortations to "do not…") are set to strangely rising melodic lines that seem to restlessly, if also cautiously, contradict the downward directional pull of the lyric ("dream yourself deep under ground").

A special feature of Emily's writing on this new collection of songs is the recurring theme of birds; this permeates her lyrics, whether depicting specifically avian characteristics, general bird-movements or jizz, or referencing individual species (nightjar, cormorant, robin, owl, swan, goose, cuckoo) or the ornithological life-cycle (as on Dotterine, and, albeit more obliquely, the heartrending title song, atmospherically recorded in a church). The jittery, fluttery, often restless delicacy of birds is mirrored in the deft and intricate musical backdrops, which combine or alternate smooth washes of wing-like string colour (Coracle, Nightjar) with scratchy peckings and feathery rustlings (Seed Stitch), in occasionally unpredictable angular rhythms (as in the heady, brightly optimistic, almost joyful May-Song-inspired Brink Of June, where Emily addresses her unborn daughter with the unforgettable line "we two shall part and meet for the first time"). Two of my favourite tracks form the disc's final impression, and are utterly compelling: there's the yearning lure of love on High Tide, floating along on a sea of rippling harp and ethereal saw, succeeded by the magnificent Hollow Feather, which flickeringly unites the strands of avian and human activity and thought in one fell swooping, piercing transformation.

The musical settings for Emily's keen ruminations are expertly managed by her colleagues in The Emily Portman Trio (Lucy Farrell and Rachel Newton, who also provide beguiling vocal harmonies, notably on the a cappella Dotterine), with a supporting cast of musicians including Toby Kearney (percussion), M.G. Boulter (guitars, pedal steel), and Sam Sweeney (violin, nyckelharpa, hardanger), and the Coracle String & Reed Players ensemble. Just occasionally the arrangements may draw over-much attention to their own finer details and rich internal balance, threatening to undermine the impact of the sung text, but generally Emily and her producer display an unerring feeling for crafted instrumental texture. Thus, the exquisite layers of cross-stitch tapestry gently unravel in support of the haunting imagery Emily conjures through her innocuous yet knowing, childlike precision, her insistent pinpointing of syllables and nuances for the bidden meaning of the words themselves. However, sometimes - just sometimes - I'd like to hear Emily making more of her vocal attributes, in other words perhaps to deliver a touch more variety and a greater hint of something more feisty (after all, there's violence in nature too).

But the combined beauty of Emily's lyrics and delivery is intense and alluring, and immediately locks you into Emily's world, from which you have no desire to escape although the darkness therein (whether overt or subliminal) can be mildly claustrophobic despite the carefully plucked and strung nature of the instrumental cradling and Andy Bell's uncannily clear-sighted production. It may sound gentle, but often it fair makes the hairs prickle on the back of your neck. For in the very act of pondering the mysteries of the eternal renewal of the life cycle, Emily also eerily enhances our sensitivity to things unseen, by means of a curiously tangible onomatopœia of something that brushes against you in the dark, that half-perceived, almost-out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye feeling of the other side. Spooky…

David Kidman