Marry Waterson & David A. Jaycock
Album: Two Wolves
Label: One Little Indian
Tracks: 15
Website: http://www.indian.co.uk

It's all of three years since Marry Waterson released Hidden, the second of a pair of intriguing, magical albums recorded with her brother Oliver Knight. Since then, she's curated autumn 2013's Bright Phoebus revival tour, then last year she designed and produced Teach Me To Be A Summer's Morning, a stunning book-and-CD-combi-release celebrating her late mother Lal's works. It must've been a bit of a blow, then, when Oliver elected to take a break from music last year, and Marry found herself "without a musical foil". That is, until, quite by chance, she was contacted by David A. Jaycock (of Big Eyes Family Players), who had been impressed with Marry's singing when he saw her performing with his mutual friend and collaborator James Yorkston back in 2009; now here he was expressing an interest in the two of them working together. Fortuitously, their initial tentative correspondence resulted in an immediate conviction that the two were on the right path.

Hearing David's music was revelatory to Marry; she reportedly found the experience sometimes scary but mostly beguiling, and soon discovered that "I could sing anything into David's tunes, the words just wrapped themselves easily around the melodies, though I had to be quite inventive sometimes to accommodate certain structures - and that gave me a different voice." Listening to this almost telepathic musical partnership at work on Two Wolves it's possible to hear what Marry means, although it's less easy to actually put this achievement into words. I could point to a more fluid approach to what might be construed as traditional song structure, for all that the songs inherently and naturally encompass a purely traditional idiom or else hark back to (or contain) a measure of definitively traditional elements; and yet, one might also say, the winding melodies almost characterise or define a tradition of their own. A uniquely Watersonian one, I'm tempted to say: an impression which is reinforced in the very obvious sense that Marry's vocal expression carries inescapable resonances of her mother, not least in terms of timbre, phrasing and accent, while as a songwriter she shares with Lal a gift for lyric poetic imagery that's eerily evocative, by turns inward-looking and melancholy or playful and outwardly celebratory, all the while embracing the inevitability of the work of a true storyteller. The songs' slightly unsettling combination of the folksy/homely and the sinister/mythical is well conjured by the simple but effective cover illustration, drawn as from the perspective of an imaginative, enthralled child.

Instrumentation is select, precise and gently aromatic, with characteristic limpid, glistening textures that say much with little fuss. All credit to the expertise of producers Neill MacColl and Kate St. John, who conjure a sound-world that's so exactly in tune with the slightly ambiguous focus of Marry's equally limpid, if often dreamlike imagery, while enabling the textures to breathe without recourse to extraneous aural clutter. David's deceptively simple yet intriguingly phrased acoustic and electric guitar patterns and subliminal synth touches are augmented variously by inventive layerings that bring in piano, oboe, cor anglais, viola, cello, accordion, Weissenborn guitar, banjo, and the sounds of obscure stringed instruments like marxophone and guitaret, and involve the talents of (among others) the album's producers, Alison Cotton, Emma Black, Simon Edwards, Michael Tanner, and (on additional vocals) Kami Thompson.

Every one of the 14 songs is a gem. Sing Me Into Your Tune, the song and an instrumental reprise of which together form bookends to the album, seems almost literally to summarise, in terms of a personal relationship, that between words and music ("You were the strange melody that came fully formed to me, The picture you painted filled the space vacated"). The sinuous melody of Hoping To Be Saved trips through the streets of the seaside town like Dylan Thomas on holiday on the North Yorkshire coast, to an enchanted cascade of viola and piano arpeggios that evoke a nostalgia for those disappearing or eroding village communities. The seaweed creeps along the beach of dreams on The Honey And The Seaweed, whose words have been fashioned by Marry out of a late-60s notebook of Lal's that contained early Bright Phoebus songs. The spine-chilling, desolate howls of the vocal melody line of Two Wolves, echoed in the theremin-like synthetones of the vintage Jen-1000, accompany an examination of the duality of human nature, expressed as an internal struggle between ego and empathy, sorrow and serenity. The fairytale Mr. Wolf crops up again later, on the skewed nostalgia of Circa '78, and the werewolf all too easily transforms into an Emotional Vampire, with whom Marry pleads (but in vein?!) "don't bleed me dry".

Caught On Coattails has an almost hallucinogenic, early Pink-Floyd quality, and is cannily succeeded by the Grantchester-Meadows birdsong-soaked a cappella invocation of the dark-side-of-nature Ginger Brown And Apple Green with its delicate poetry and enigmatic seesaw melody, blown to and fro in the aniseed wind. The extraordinary Woolgathering Girl is a lilting exhortation to "lullaby me to sleep when the bubble's zipped up", creating another dreamlike juxtaposition, this time one which invokes the ghosts of Lewis Carroll, Grace Slick, Frank Baum, Billie Holiday (Lady Day who sang the Blues), Dylan Thomas (again), Modigliani, Nilsson and Astaire - all with carefree delicacy and fancy fleet footwork. More ghosts of the past inhabit Velvet Yeller, which may well be rhyming slang for "storyteller" but is undoubtedly a loving tribute to uncle Mike (Waterson), samples of whose iconic Topic rendition of the classic ballad Tam Lin constitute a thread woven through the track (now Marry "singing" with Mike - is that eerie or wot?). On Mockingbird, the chaperone's "everyday déjà-vus find their cue in the waking moon" to a mysterious breathing soundtrack. The above paragraphs voice just a handful of observations on the intense quality and distinctive character of these powerfully resonant, mesmeric and slightly challenging songs.

November is clearly proving to be a vintage month for striking and brilliant new releases, with Marry Waterson and Elle Osborne already vying for my "album of the year" vote.

David Kidman