The Woodbine & Ivy Band
Album: Sleep On Sleeping On
Label: Static Caravan
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.facebook.com/woodbineandivyband

While this Manchester collective's eponymous debut album of 2011 took as its basis a clutch of traditional folk songs, its followup is a much more disparate collection that both prides in that very disparity and emphasises the kinship between the different musics which have inspired it. At the same time, its impact is rather like that of a half-remembered, half-imagined state of attention that's partly inspired by Gurdjieff's theories on what he termed "waking sleep", a state through which we drift and "sleep on sleeping on". Compared to the Woodbine & Ivy debut, this latest album boasts a drastically reduced complement of singers, using only Jenny McCormick and James Raynard this time round, while in terms of overall methodology the customised folksong-cover" approach is more frequently supplanted by that of the slightly extended prog-folk jam as a workthrough means of expression; as a consequence Sleep On Sleeping On tend to feel like an altogether more leisurely affair, however carefully programmed the individual tracks' arrangements might be.

The album's opening gambit (the title track) is a floating instrumental foray that combines influences from Miles Davis and ambient, which ushers in the mournful Arm A Nation, audibly and lyrically inspired by the music of the Woodstock generation, on which Jenny plaintively decries the international arms trade. In contrast, the traditional folksong White Hare is transformed into a fuzz-guitar-drenched slice of grungey swamp-rock boogie into which texture are injected sporadic horn-bursts; and against all the odds it works. The gentler acoustic spacey meanderings of Jackdaws, with their sampled jackdaw-cawings backdrop, seem to adopt the principle of Roger Waters' Grantchester Meadows (part of his personal allocation on the Floyd's idiosyncratic Ummagumma album). The delicate Pretty Fly Lullaby (plucked from the soundtrack of the 1955 film Night Of The Hunter and given an eerie, almost Morricone twist) is an unusual yet highly successful entrant into the arena which, like the outstanding cover of Lal Waterson's Flight Of The Pelican later on the record, features Jenny's soft, sinuous, malleable tones, both songs being a triumph of both delivery and interpretation here. James takes the vocal lead on four tracks, including the aforementioned White Hare and the disc's ostensible centrepiece, a distinctly 70s-inflected folk-rock revisit of The Minstrel And The King, an interestingly obscure item from the annals of prog-folk sourced from a 1972 LP by the band Heron. James also gives us the album's most overtly folky moment, Old Man, a gentle, limpid and pared-down-acoustic reworking of Death And The Lady that rather recalls Bert Jansch. Its thoughtful fragility paves the way for the final item, a classical-jazz-tinged, piano-driven take on the American Civil War lament Rebel Soldier complete with keening pedal steel.

Folk's always been a broad church, and the Woodbine & Ivy Band sure know how to worship there, celebrating folk music and culture in all its diversity with a highly developed sense of style and considerable insight. And you too can keep the faith.

David Kidman