Folk music has been taking a bit of a kicking of late with bands and artists claiming folkiness by virtue of the fact they bought themselves an acoustic guitar and couldn’t find someone to drum for them.
And so, the circle jerk of self-confessional, mewing horsepiss continues as acts open their hearts to the listener with imagined woes and vague interested in Olde World topics such as hangmen and infanticide, when really, they’d rather be listening to the awful Florence And The Machine or something.
However, some folkies get it just right, channelling the ghosts of music past and recreating that echoing eeriness of mountain music without trying to sound like a revivalist act. One such group are Arborea who have two impressive LPs to their name already, and here we are, faced with their third, ‘Red Planet’.
Previous outings, the eponymous release and the seriously good ‘Wayfaring Summer’, have seen Arborea creating the kind of music that has the chilling stillness of a murderous road movie coupled with the yearning, sexual tension of fables or yore.
While they are a very modern band with sensibilities drawn from a whole host of relatively recent outfits, this outfit feel like they’re a hundred years old, resonating down the wind while you find yourself stood under the Joshua Tree staring at that big ol’ sky. There’s a sense of this music finding you, rather than you finding it, which makes for an unusual set-up when that sense of feeling a little lost in the wilderness creeps up on you when listening, especially in songs such ‘Black Is The Colour’ and ‘Wolves’.
Yet this isn’t the work of someone indebted too heavily to The Carter Family or some Appalachian mountain choir. While Arborea may well share that other-worldliness that makes certain folk and country records so appealing, there’s something else in the mix… something cinematic.
The title track, ‘Red Planet’ and closer ‘A Little Time’ feel like Boards of Canada – unplugged, while ‘Careless Love’ is most definitely a twilight sex-scene from some forest dwelling b-movie about witchcraft. There’s a sense that this is a band that want to invite you to a place you won’t find on any map with songs that have huge amounts of space in them… great chasms of open sky that could be filled by countless instrumentation, but cannily, it’s what isn’t there that makes Arborea’s work so enchanting.
Singer Shanti’s voice filled the canvas with delicate falsettos or, when needed, a low murmur that will certainly send the wandering stranger to his death in some remote place, all the while, sitting beneath you’ll find sparse banjo or plucked guitar, coloured with bottlenecks and harmoniums which hold back and use just the right notes with an almost Kraftwerk-esque precision and efficiency.
It appears that, while most bands find album three the trickiest to approach, Arborea have once again created a document that invites us into their strange world of white magic, hallucinogenic sex and whispered secrets. This really is a wonderful LP and one that deserves as wide an audience as possible.
If we gave marks out of five, this would get a six.
You can still catch the band on the last leg of their European tour before they head-off to their cabins in North America and ‘Red Planet’ is available to buy now.
Wed 22nd – Edinburgh, Forest Hall
Thurs 23rd – Aberdeen, The Tunnels
Fri 24th – Glasgow, Wellington Church Hall
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