OR   Search for Artist/Title    Advanced Search
 
you are not logged in...  [login] 
All Reviews    Edit This Review     
Review: 'GRASSCUT'
'Everyone Was A Bird'   

-  Label: 'Lo Recordings'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '18th May 2015'

Our Rating:
Everyone Was A Bird is a stunning song cycle deeply rooted in landscape, literature and memory. It comprises elements of modern classical music, pastoral folk and ambient electronica with songs augmented by voice samples, live strings, drums, piano and guitar.

This immersive work is that of two literate Englishmen, Andrew Phillips and Marcus O’Dair. This scholarly duo are ably abetted by numerous living musicians and the words of erudite thinkers passing on wisdom from beyond the grave.

Musically speaking, the driving force comes from Phillips, a composer, producer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist who has built a solid reputation for his soundtrack work. The sound of this album is heavily influenced by his string quartet-based score for a documentary about the 1988 North Sea oil rig disaster on Piper Alpha.

Alongside him, Marcus O'Dair's chief role is as manager, although he also plays keyboards and double bass. In addition, I imagine him providing further intellectual substance to the songs given that, outside of Grasscut, he is a noted writer, broadcaster and lecturer; his authorised biography of Robert Wyatt was published in 2014.

After two previous albums for Ninja Tune, Everyone Was A Bird is the first to be released on Lo Recordings. Digital technology is a key part of the band’s sound but this record is described as their most live and organic release to date. Through an intelligent interplay of natural and synthetic sounds, the multi-layered songs contain a rich blend of textures.

In terms of methodology, some similarities can be drawn to New York duo The Books although Grasscut's perspective is so quintessentially English that the Ghost Box Music of Julian House and Jim Jupp is perhaps a more accurate analogy.

Phillips contributes guitar, piano, bass, synths and programming, and the range is further extended thanks to musicians recruited for live shows to promote their previous album (Unearth) in 2012. These include Aram Zarikian on drums, Emma Smith on violin, and Vince Sipprell on viola.

Meanwhile, Snowdown features Norwegian singer Elisabeth Nygaard (LOOP Collective) on vocals and the bass clarinet of John Surman.

Among the other contributors are Adrian Crowley (Chemikal Underground) and Seamus Fogarty(Fence/Lost Map), whose vocals can be heard on Halflife and Red Kite respectively.

In his expansive liner notes, travel writer Robert Macfarlane outlines some of the complexity and depth of the album's key themes. He writes: "Glimpsed dreams, fugitive memories, and landscape apparitions are its preoccupations; decay, flight and radioactivity its motifs".

All 8 tracks correspond to a particular place and Andrew Phillips says: "All of the lyrics and the time-signatures have come while running or walking.".

Islander is set in the north coast of Jersey where Phillips grew up while Snowdown and The Field are inspired by the Sussex Downs, close to his current home in Brighton. It is surely no coincidence that Fallswater should begin with the voice of Hilaire Belloc, a writer who spent most of his life in West Sussex.

The other songs are based in and around the Mawddach Estuary in mid Wales from where Phillips' family originate.

Despite the geographical specificity of these songs, the listener's role is not confined to passively admiring the scenery. The implicit message is that by becoming proactive observers we gain a clearer sense of our place in the world.

Since places and buildings are so closely associated with formative experiences, Phillips intention appears to be to illustrate how physical aspects of the past have an insidious way of intruding on the present; something we may easily overlook if we blithely view our surroundings through rose-tinted spectacles.

The album’s title is taken from Siegfried Sassoon's Armistice poem Everyone Sang which ends: "O but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done". Further ornithoplogical metaphors figure in Curlews, the first single, which takes flight via its arpeggiated melody and beautiful string arrangement.

The closing track,Red Kite, features a sample of Sassoon himself reading the words from his poem. This can be tenuously linked to Halflife which in part refers to Welsh poet Hedd Wyn who was killed in the First World War and who, like Sassoon, joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

Wyn came from the village of Trawsfynydd which, in 1959, became the site of a twin-reactor Magnox nuclear power station. This sinister association is denoted in Halflife by ending with some words of Scottish architect Sir Basil Spence who, in dulcet tones, reminds us of the gulf between reality and idealised worlds: "In the imagination there is always perfection ...but when you put it down and build it, all the faults are there".

The incongruous link between poetry and radioactivity also appears on Radar which takes its title from ominous lines from American poet George Oppen who, in 1963, wrote of a world "as dark as radar".

In evoking these voices and images of the past, the changing aspects of English culture and landscape are shown to be indelibly linked to the present.

Phillips' richly nuanced songs illustrate how the places we know and have known become part of the way we see ourselves.

As such, what on the surface might seem like a gently nostalgic musical tour through England's green and pleasant land gradually reveals itself to be a thought-provoking exploration of the nature of identity.

An unforgettable journey.



Grasscut's website
  author: Martin Raybould

[Show all reviews for this Artist]

READERS COMMENTS    10 comments still available (max 10)    [Click here to add your own comments]

There are currently no comments...
----------



GRASSCUT - Everyone Was A Bird
GRASSCUT - Everyone Was A Bird