(2022) Eliza Carthy & The Restitution - Queen of the Whirl    



Review:
Thirty years ago Eliza Carthy left school before A Levels to become a touring musician. This was “against parental advice” but in line with parental precedent: her father Martin Carthy and mother Norma Waterson had been leading lights of the British folk renaissance in the 1960s. While Eliza’s own career has since swung financially between rags and riches, artistically it has been relentlessly inventive. Queen of the Whirl revisits 15 songs she has written or interpreted, a set list crowdsourced from her Twitter followers. Carthy describes her work not as folk music but as English music, and the songs here span a huge range. There are several traditional songs: opener “Whirly Whorl” edges in moodily with tremolo-laden guitar from David Delarre before the riddling balladry takes over. “The Snow It Melts the Soonest” mingles electric guitar with an icy layer of organ from Phil Alexander and Carthy’s singing an echo of Anne Briggs. There is a post-punk shuffle and prickle to “Jacky Tar”, with its pumping accordion suitably Chaucerian for the narrative’s bed trick. But the cross-dressing matelot of the epic “In London So Fair” tells her tale all but a cappella, with minimal guitar and piano. There are also songs from her parents’ generation: her aunt Lal Waterson’s “Stumbling On” gets a barrelhouse rendition. Pete Seeger’s diversity anthem “My Father’s Mansions” is treated as a hymn, accordion humming amid piano arpeggios as Willy Molleson’s drums hammer the messages down. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger are represented by the ebullient “Space Girl”, which from the vantage point of 1952 plays with what were already clichés of science fiction. “My mama told me”, vamps Carthy laconically, “that Venus was too hot and Saturn not much fun/Bug-eyed monsters tended to be just a trifle dumb/She said I’d need a blaster and I’d need a freezer gun/And I did, I did . . . ” Right at the end, “Good Morning Mr Walker” makes a rousing close out of one of Carthy’s mother’s favourite calypsos (Waterson was briefly a disc jockey for Radio Antilles) with a cast of musical friends past and present. The rest of the songs are Carthy’s own compositions. Her younger self recalls various humiliations on “The Company of Men”; “Blood On My Boots” recounts how she fell flat on her face on a London street after a drunken night out at the premier of Jerry Springer: The Opera; “Accordion Song” turns a Tennysonian inscription on an old gravestone into a Gothic tale of lust. — ft.com





Track List:

Queen of the Whirl EP I - The Snow It Melts the Soonest
01 - Whirly Whorl
02 - The Snow It Melts the Soonest
03 - The Company of Men
04 - Jacky Tar

Queen of the Whirl EP II - Stumbling On
01 - My Father's Mansion
02 - Mr Magnifico
03 - Mohair
04 - Stumbling On

Queen of the Whirl EP III - Blood on My Boots
01 - Space Girl
02 - Two Tears
03 - Blood on My Boots

Queen of the Whirl EP IV - Accordion Song
01 - Pretty Plough Boy
02 - In London So Fair
03 - Accordion Song
04 - Good Morning Mr Walker


Media Report:
Genre: british folk, folk-rock, indie-folk
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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