Reviews
Artist: Elle Osborne
Album: So Slowly Slowly Got She Up
Label: Folk Police
Tracks: 11
Website:http://www.elleo.com
Every now and then there's an album that comes along that shatters any preconceptions that you have about a genre, "So Slowly Slowly Got She Up" is just such an album. What this album does is firmly reunite folk with the tradition. It evokes the spirit of folk revivals of days gone by with the singer, in this case Elle Osborne, finding themselves in the song.
There are a number of well known folk songs on here as well as ones that are less familiar to me, but I'll focus on three of the best known, "My Coffin Shall Be Black", "Dalesman's Litany" and "Three Score And Ten". These songs have all been played by many artist and recorded by a good number of those. I've heard them from bands and solo artists, contemporary and traditional, but there is something about the way Elle Osborne tackles them that makes you feel you have stepped into somewhere timeless.
What I mean by that is that I genuinely feel that this album could have been recorded in the last hundred or more years. You can imagine these songs being sung in a boffey, next to a canal, in an old cider house or a country fair.
Some of the songs she delivers in a purely vocal form, others have her accompanied by a band that often verges on rough music, the beautiful thing about this album, is that I think Elle could simply swap the unaccompanied and accompanied songs around and have delivered an equally stunning album. She has a real feel for a song and delivers its essence with or without instrumentation. She understands that songs are living things and like all living things they need their roots.
It's not a perfect album, Elle Osborne has not got a finally pitched voice that delivers perfect note after perfect note. The band aren't tight but both Elle and the musicians have delivered an album that is so full of character it could qualify for its own show on BBC4 and with this being a folk album, there's plenty of death and tattered dreams and you feel each one of them matters.
Neil King