Wes Finch
Album: Awena
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.wesfinch.co.uk

For his third album, Coventry-born Finch has moved away from the busker folk and Americana elements of the past for a more considered, pared back and atmospheric sound that is firmly rooted in England's past, placing the production reins in the capable hands of Gerry Diver who, with his work with Hooley & Tidow and Lisa Knapp, clearly knows his way round that sort of thing.

Ringing the changes from the start, the album (titled after his mother's Welsh name, meaning 'inspiration') opens with Handfast which, initially accompanied by sepulchral piano before electric guitar and fiddle erupt, details a pagan wedding ceremony ("burn the book or turn the page…. jump the dying fire with me") and, like many of the numbers, stops dead rather than fade away. Inspired by walking the English countryside and gathering stories (seemingly the darker the better) along the way, the album is also informed by Finch's recent reading, among which includes such writers as Robert Macfarlane, Alan Warner and Ronald Blythe. Along with an artist who told him about her brother on leave from the navy. it was Blythe's 1969 social history novel Ackenfield : Portrait of an English Village (a fictionalised account of life in a Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966, later made into a film by Peter Hall) that partly inspired the tempo shifting Red Coat, accordion heralding the story of a man who enlists to escape rural poverty, returns home "with more money than sense", lording it over his family and rolling round drunk before taking off soldiering again in search of "promises of glory that would never come", his coat among the hedgerows as he left looking like the poppies they now lay on his grave.

A passage in one of Warner's novels and the unsung Irish navvies who built England's roads and canals provide the inspiration for Jackie's Stone, the ultimately tragic tale of two brothers recounted over rustic fingerpicked guitar and clicked percussion as the narrator recalls a fatal night on the town when things turned nasty, "there were two of us and six of them, And there were things I saw the likes of which I never wish to see again."

For The Widow Thomas, he draws on the real life friendship between WWI soldier-poets Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, who used to go walking together when Thomas visited Gloucestershire. Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 and, after the war, Gurney, suffering mental health problems from his experiences, spent his last 15 years in an asylums and it at one of these that Thomas' widow, Helen, visited him in 1932, on one occasion taking with her an Ordnance Survey map of the area where Gurney and her late husband used to walk. It's a poignant story and Finch's song captures it beautifully, the music melancholically etched with strings, acoustic guitar and accordion.

Opening with a circling, repetitive acoustic guitar riff and building to a swelling tumult, Smiling Loner maintains the dark cloud of mental illness ("snapping his fingers, muttering vinegar and piss") with what seems to be a sharply observed song about characters suffering from depression, metaphorically embodied here as a black dog that sufferers continue to feed ("he's not gonna leave you alone if you keep throwing scraps at him, putting the flesh on his bones").

A presence in several of the songs, death reappears on Man Of Bones, written, he says, in the tradition of Death and the Lady, as, over shimmering strings and acoustic guitar before building to a sonic crescendo, the protagonist seeks to bargain with the Reaper for another year with his wife, son and new baby. More chilling is the vague hint that he may be suggesting death takes them in his place.

Set in a harbour town, the protagonist in the slow, sad guitar and fiddle arranged Corrine has already lost his beloved (drowned at sea) and now spends his time aimlessly sailing and drinking as he holds on to and is consumed by memories "clear as a bell, I can still hear you tell, that filthy joke.") while separation (or at least emotional distance) also lies at the heart of the spooked, spidery and starkly, sung Maurice, a song addressing the fear of being tied down, Finch's voice passionately soaring as he sings " I hope you find some piece of mind."

The album ends on a pretty downbeat note too, bringing together the ideas of loss, depression and death that have percolated throughout on Riverbed, opening unaccompanied as Finch take son the persona of a man on a lovers leap bridge, staring down at the river into which his wife threw her wedding ring as she says "she had enough of me and so have I" and contemplating whether to follow it in before, totally unexpectedly the number, turns into a jaunty, dobro rocking Dylanish talking blues with rimshot percussion and a quote from the House of the Rising Son (relocated to Birmingham) before climaxing in an all out rocking repeat of the opening lines.

There is one other track and, like the closer, something that catches you completely by surprise as, for the penultimate number, Finch takes on Elvis classic Love Me Tender, recast as something of a stalker's love song that begins with an crackly, echoey vocal and simple guitar from just one speaker and then schizophrenically opens out into a lushly orchestrated treatment as it goes from cracked reality to some sort of delusional fantasy complete with what sounds like a typewriter in amid the swirl of sound effects as madness overwhelms. Somehow, I suspect I will never be able to listen to the song in quite the same way ever again. As an album it takes a bit of listening to fully absorb and appreciate, but, as Finch himself says of the collaboration with Diver, it's "a potent combination at the edge of modern music making" and, I suspect, something of a gamechanger.

Mike Davies