Various Artists
Album: Weirdlore:Notes From The Folk Underground
Label: Folk Police
Tracks: 18
Website: http://www.folkpolicerecordings.com

This fabulous new compilation has just been released to coincide with a planned (but subsequently, unfortunately, cancelled due to poor advance ticket sales) all-day festival in Bristol, which was to celebrate of the proud and unfettered diversity of the often eccentric twilight-zone sub-genre of folk music that, now (conveniently?) bracketed as Weirdlore, has hitherto been concealed under assorted tags and labels ranging from alt to wyrd, acid, psych, freak and strange folk. It's a thriving scene alright, as the sheer creativity on display here amply demonstrates, witnessing both an artistic renaissance and a transformation from what only a handful of years back lived up to an unfortunate, but arguably deservedly unfashionable image of wilfully wrong-side-of-pretentious retro-regurgitation. The high standard of the various contributions, their self-evident integrity, at once gives the lie to any potential charges of mere bandwagon-jumping, although for the uninitiated the customary caveat will probably need voicing at the outset: i.e., that even the most habitually adventurous of folk listeners may not warm to every single track (well, at least not immediately maybe).

Weirdlore presents an entirely credible snapshot of the delights on offer from a healthy and varied selection of the scene's current exponents, with such big-in-the-genre names as Alasdair Roberts and Emily Portman unashamedly yet sympathetically placed alongside less-widely-known folk like Telling The Bees (their Worship Of Trees kicks off the album in impressive style, sporting a superb string arrangement) and hitherto-new-to-me acts like Foxpockets (whose Grendel is one of the disc's highpoints) and Wyrdstone.

Perhaps my favourite track of all is Pamela Wyn Shannon's beguiling, delicate and exquisitely tangible Moss Mantra, a thing of gentle gossamer sensory beauty; I also loved Kate Denny's strong cover of the lesser-known Robin Williamson opus Come With Me, Starless & Bible Black's delectably ethereal If You Fall I'll Fall With You, Nancy Wallace's shiversome Walking Into Walls, and Alasdair Roberts' eerie exposition of the power of Loki the Norse trickster god. In the more determinedly eccentric category come Katie Rose's chant Witches' Reel, The Straw Bear Band's sinisterly bee-witching Black Hive, and Boxcar Aldous Huxley's carnivalesque whatever-fits pagan-gypsy-free-jazz Hora; oh, and fRoots' editor Ian Anderson even throws his hand in, here in tandem with Ben Mandelson under the guise of The False Beards.

Lyric-wise, the more obviously traditional end of the weirdlore spectrum is filtered through the trusty Rapunzel & Sedayne (who contribute a typically delightfully twisted reworking of The Innocent Hare), the enigmatic Sproatly Smith (whose epic treatment of Rosebuds In June is a wonder to behold), and Harp & A Monkey (with a gleeful reimagination of the naughty Molecatcher). OK, so not quite all of the other selections are ideally intelligible in terms of lyrics, but the power of the music and the imagination of the settings usually overcomes any such misgivings.

The disc is attractively packaged, and the enclosed booklet contains a useful (if maybe slightly cheeky) introduction by the aforementioned Ian Anderson, which is followed by an even more useful, and signally percipient, essay by Jeanette Leech (author of the acclaimed Seasons They Change book) expounding on the character and development over the past decade or so of the strain of folk which this disc exemplifies. For, as Jeanette so rightly points out, "Weirdlore comes a, well, a rather weird time. It's not a document of a scene at its beginning, yet neither is it a eulogy. It finds a complicated and diverse set of experiences. It suggests ends already reached, but it also offers shining possibilities down untutored, weed-ridden paths." In which context, therefore, "It's time to feed from the soil instead of the sunlight." How very true…

David Kidman