Reviews

Artist:Lunatraktors2
Album: The Missing Star
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.lunatraktors.space/

With the release of their 2019 debut album This Is Broken Folk, the Margate duo announced themselves as a unique alternative force in interpreting traditional folk music. Meeting in Prague, choreographer Carli Jefferson and nonbinary folk singer Clair Le Couteur combined the former's tap body drum percussion and tonal drums with the latter's four octave vocal range to jawdropping effect. Last year saw their Bonefires EP expanding the musical palette with harmonium, whistles, piano and synth bass, a progression furthered here with reed instruments and Julian Whitfield taking on coproduction duties.

A mix of traditional and contemporary with their own interpolations and commentary on the state of the times, it opens with the slow march and handclaps rhythm 'Rigs Of The Times', adapted from an early C19th century English traditional to take in Brexit and Covid for a scathing observation on corporate corruption where "honesty's all out of fashion" and clapping to save the NHS is likened to clapping to save Tinkerbell.

Going back a couple of centuries, sung unaccompanied save for the opening drone, 'My Witch' is adapted from a verse by Nicholas Breton and, despite the brooding tune is actually a love song about being bewitched by her eyes and wit. Then, crashing back to today, although initially unrecognisable with its junkyard clatter and start declamatory verses, the chorus finally reveals 'Lover Lover Lover' to be the Cohen invocation, here arranged with strings by Geoffrey Richardson of Caravan and Penguin Café Orchestra fame.

Again starting unaccompanied, their contrasting voices briefly entwining before introducing the instrumental section featuring singing bowl, a bronze bowl, cymbal and double pipe, just 76 seconds long, 'Mirie It Is (Anemoia)' dates back to the early 1200s and, sounding appropriately medieval, is the oldest known fragment of English song. Apparently anemoia means a longing for a time you've never known, fitting neatly with the tracks eerie feel.

The title track, set to a galumphing tune improvised on melodica and sounding suitably ominous in a Wicker Man sort of way, returns to the political commentary with the lyrics adapted from 2020 speeches by the Conservative and Brexit parties with references to fake news, media elites, statistics and social distancing, the line about going round the mulberry bush reinforcing a sense that, in echoing the Brexit call called to take back control and, a la the Walrus and the Carpenter, "come and join the dance", this is a dark nursery rhyme, essentially their 'Another Brick in The Wall'.

A mood piece instrumental, if that's not too elaborate a term for its minimal ambience, 'Drone Code' is constructed around singing bowl and analog synth before returning to traditional pastures, specifically 1807 County Clare or earlier, for, accompanied by harmonium drone, the quietly mesmerising call and refrain response 'The Keening', adapted from' Keening of the Three Marys', the term an Irish expression of sorrow or lamenting.

Though rather better known in trad folk circles, 'Unquiet Grave' gets a makeover in line with the album's political bent, delivered with ghostly Irish whistle, wind effects and disorienting distorted and fractured percussion and bowed cymbal. rewritten to include imagery from two 19th Century songs about industrial tragedies and reworked as a rewritten as a critique of Tory austerity and its victims and a call to "seek justice from those who call Westminster home".

Again mining the broadside ballads of the 1800s, 'The Exciseman' is a variant of a Kent shaggy dog tale about a customs offer being outwitted into serving as a porter by one of the locals, named Michael, he suspects of smuggling. As befits its celebratory nature of getting one over authority, it's a lively percussive number with an improvisatory free jazz feel.

Adapted from an Irish-Australian emigration ballad of possibly not entirely traditional provenance, '16,000 Miles' is couched in a discordant, fractured melody serrated with analogue bass and melodica, the agitated vocals, sometimes spoke,, swooping and diving as if jerking in a fit, the toora looras sung as though mangled like a possessed banshee.

A further instrumental, 'The Madness That Soothes', is an impressionistic solo for a HAPI tongue drum leading to the wholly a capella reading of the traditional 'The Blacksmith' which, in this account comes from a broadsheet featuring lyrics not included in other extant recordings making reference to plants associated with unwanted pregnancy, giving it a whole new undercurrent.

It ends with 'Ecclesiastes 1. 1-18', a free translation by Le Couteur working from Hebrew dictionaries and various versions of The Bible and Torah and given a dark, baritone cabaret treatment backed by piano and percussion that conjures thoughts of Nick Cave, Tindersticks and Scott Walker with lyrics that speak of the insignificance of man in the face of the vastness of the universe as "a generation passes, a generation comes, with the Earth still turning" and that "with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief".

Intoxicating and disturbing in equal measure, a transmogrified past offering a vision of the future, it's unlikely you'll hear another album of its kind this year. Stellar indeed.

Mike Davies

Previous	Next
Sarah-Jane Summers and Juhani Silvola: The Smoky Smirr O Rain	Davey Dodds: The Rite Of Spring

Recent Reviews

Rigs Of The Times

Fatea Showcase Sessions

The Fatea Showcase Sessions are a series of downloads featuring acts that we've really enjoyed and think that more people should get the chance to hear.

Pirate is the current session and features 16 fantastic artists check out the website to find out more about them and download your copy

www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk for all the artist information.

Visit The FATEA Archive!