Trembling Bells
Album: The Sovereign Self
Label: Tin Angel
Tracks: 8
Website: www.tremblingbells.com

Their fifth studio album in seven years, with a cover that features a series of twenty portraits drawn by singer Lavina Blackwell (ranging from Lou Reed to Ovid), the Glaswegian outfit are clearly not one to let the grass grow under their feet. Having already established a reputation for not so much pushing the folk rock envelope as turning it inside out, this, the recording debut of additional guitarist Alasdair Mitchell, is arguably their most inventive and stimulating release yet. Coming off the back of a series of dates with Mike Heron, it's probably inevitable that the influence of the Incredible String Band looms even larger than on past releases, patently so on the heady Anglo-Scottish psychfolk of O, Where Is Saint George and Sweet Death Polka, the warbling vocals on the latter very reminiscent of Robin Williamson.

Fuelled by the collapse of songwriter/drummer Alex Neilson's relationship, not only is it lyrically quite dark (he says he immersed himself in Greek tragedy, Sophocles in particular, before he started writing, while the album title is taken from a line by Dennis Potter), but, a result of greater collaboration in the arranging and recording process, it's also heavily steeped in 70s psychedelic progfolk.

A case in point is the album's madrigal-like opener 'Tween The Womb And The Tomb, an eight minute epic on which Blackwell sounds like a cross between Annie Haslem from Renaissance and Les Mysteres de Voix Bulgares fronting a mix of early Jefferson Airplane and Iron Butterfly.

It sets the tone for what follows, a Ray Manzarak organ drone and guitar riffing groove percolating through the jamming spiralling of Killing Time In London Fields, a driving drum beat, heady prog-blues organ and bare bones bass riff providing the urgent backdrop to Blackwell's chant-like vocals as the track spins out into a cosmic sonic maelstrom.

After that The Singing Blood comes as almost light relief, a sort of Trembling Bells version of a folksy pub singsong with waltzing melody and saloon piano that harks back to their Carpeth days before it plunges back into wigged out freak-folk territory with (Perched Like A Drunk On A) Miserichord, delivered with an accelerated heartbeat punk energy. It all finally draws to a conclusion with the six minute Is Someone Else, another cacophonous but melodically soaring 70s Airplane-esque acid folk number with Blackwell coming across more like Signe Anderson than Grace Slick. Sometimes exhausting listening perhaps, but, turned up to full volume and flooding your senses, it's never anything less than electrically exhilarating.

Mike Davies