“Lock all the doors and close the shutters,” sings Karine Polwart over a drone of viola and pricking, solitary notes of piano. What could be another musical response to lockdown is in fact a response to a fragmentary poem, written in 2017 by the academic Robert Macfarlane, in an attempt to give new currency to the word “bramble”. A new edition of a children’s dictionary had dropped a slew of, as he put it, “common nature words from acorn to wren, bluebell, conker, heron. In their place had come broadband, block graph, attachment and MP3 player — which has gone the way of all things.”
Macfarlane and the illustrator Jackie Morris’s picture book, The Lost Words, was “beautiful protest” against “this widening gulf between nature and childhood and the loss of a basic natural literacy”. The extended universe of the book includes Spell Songs, a group of folk musicians who came together to perform and adapt texts from the book. This follow-up now draws on the book’s sequel, The Lost Spells.
The album is a testament to the interplay between the musicians, honed in a residency in the Lake District at which the original album and many of these songs were composed. Polwart’s opening reworking of “Bramble” includes Julie Fowlis singing a Gaelic version of the voice of the song thrush, which then segues neatly into Fowlis’s reading of the traditional lullaby “St Kilda Wren”.
Seckou Keita’s kora ripples through “Jay” and “Barn Owl”, the latter’s theme of taking no more than you need echoing Polwart’s earlier “Thrift (Dig In, Dig In)”, which uses the eponymous plant as a way to reclaim the virtue of the same name not as meanness but as satisfaction with sufficiency. Kris Drever’s “Oak”, set to an instantly memorable melody, is both an arboreal taxonomy (“poplar is the whispering tree, rowan is the sheltering tree, willow is the weeping tree”) and a hymn to the human uses of oak, from wheel to barn to table to coffin.
Despite the warnings of disappearing words and species, the album resists revelling in ecological doom. Jim Molyneux’s “Swallow” finds courage in the bleakest days of the pandemic by looking forward to the return of migrating birds. Rachel Newton’s “Swifts” spin joyfully in their “hooligan bands”. Even “Bramble” in the end, reverses itself. “Open the doors, unfold the shutters/the air flutters.”
★★★★☆
‘Spell Songs II: Let the Light In’ is released by Thirty Tigers
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