David Lance Callahan’s third solo album
‘Down To The Marshes’ confirms the former Moonshake as an extraordinary artist who is able to merge various influences into a new and personal style
Photo cover: James Fry
The pandemic and subsequent lockdown really affected everyone’s life, not only that of ordinary people but also that of artists who found themselves having to deal with unfamiliar dynamics. Among the few, very few good things to come out of that extremely complex, difficult and controversial period was the coming out of the shell of an artist who had branded the British post-rock scene of the 1990s. I am talking about David Lance Callahan, awesome artist and musician, one of the founders in the mid-1980s of The Wolfhounds who took part in an iconic compilation called C86 and, later, creator of Moonshake that, together with other bands from the Too Pure label, gave a huge contribution with energetic imagination to creating a kaleidoscopic post-rock scene in Great Britain. After successfully reforming The Wolfhounds a few years ago, the pandemic led David to put his hand to many of the tracks he had prepared and to release, after more than 30 years in the business, his first, stunning solo albums, the differing twins English Primitive I and II.
After two albums of such high quality it was legitimate to have high expectations for the third chapter of his solo career, and the newly released Down To The Marshes, let’s be clear, has not disappointed expectations at all. The album’s title was inspired by the Lee Valley Regional Park, a 10,000-acre park where Callahan spent a lot of time walking during the lockdown period. Watching people wandering and running around made Callahan start to think about their lives as seasons. From those thoughts came out both the title track and the artwork, as the main themes that develop within the 8 tracks are town versus country, history versus now and animal versus human. The author’s interest in nature and animals is not surprising, as he is a great expert in birdwatching, a passion that has also led him to write several books on the subject.
Although the lyrics explore, as always, the deeply troubling current state of the UK (and beyond), the album was recorded in Valencia, Spain, where his label (Tiny Global) is based, which provided him with a studio as large and functional as it is cheap. Along with him we find the long-standing drummer Daren Garratt (Pram, The Fall, The Nightingales), the violinist and singer Mel Draisey (The Clientele), the horn player Terry Edwards (Gallon Drunk and most recently in PJ Harvey’s band), the musical saw of visual artist Catherine Gerbrands and the excellent musicians of the local Berklee College of Music, among whom the talented multi-instrumentalist Cris Belda stands out.
David Lance Callahan (Photo: James Fry)
Within the tracks I found the usual elements of folk, West African, blues, Indian and post-punk music already shown in the first two albums, but in this occasion the sound palette is expanded thanks to a wind section and a string quartet capable of enhancing the melodies. Exemplary in this sense is the opening of ‘The Spirit World’, with an acoustic guitar and violin leading an airy and relaxed track where even the lyrics are more optimistic than usual without disdaining a hint of sarcasm.
We spoke earlier about the title track from a lyrical point of view, while musically it is notable for its incorporation of folk, blues and modes from one of the countries where British colonisation was most important such as India without losing an ounce of the author’s deep personality, at ease even under a magnificent string quartet. The following ‘Refugee Blues’ takes us back to previous albums with its sharp, circular guitar sound, Garratt’s essential percussive contribution and a lyric that is a reinterpretation, updated to our dark times, of a 1939 WH Auden poem that emphasised the indifference of other countries to Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War. Unfortunately, we can hear sentences such as “If we let them in, they’ll steal our daily bread” too often nowadays.
Again there is a sharp and awesome interplay of percussion and guitar with oriental reminiscences in ‘Kiss Chase’, which opens into an open, melodic refrain underlining the difficulty of finding a partner whom you can really trust. ‘The Montgomery’ is an haunting reminder still going back to the WWII. A song performed by Callahan alone on guitar and vocals with Anna Ferrandiz’s ghostly siren-like voice in the background talking about the sunken wreck of the Montgomery, stuck in a sandbank on the Thames estuary, constantly threatening to explode as the tide rises and falls. Instead, it is the Hammond organ and woodwinds that are the fellow adventurers in ‘Father Thames And Mother London’, which bitterly photographs a capital city where visitors are “queueing gawpers who pay for a cartoon bloody dungeon” and residents don’t really even know who lives next to them.
The atmospheres become more open again with the stunning ‘Robin Reliant’, which, returning to his second great passion, birdwatching, shows us the talent and state of grace of one of the UK’s most personal and creative artists, capable of creating his own genre with his own rules, moving from his love for sampling and the krautrock influences of his former band Moonshake to the development of a new English folk. The album is closed by the dreamy folk ballad ‘Island State’, which features Sukie Smith on backing vocals.
It was not easy at all to keep up the excellent standards of his first two solo works, but with Down To The Marshes David Lance Callahan confirms himself not only as a cult hero but also as an artist capable of mixing psychedelia, folk, Indian suggestions and melodic openings in an absolutely personal way, also confirming himself as one of the sharpest contemporary lyricists, able to write in an ingenious and never conventional way about British and world politics, perfectly managing to describe not only the nature around us, but also some of the characters and corporations of current social life with black humour and sarcasm.
TRACKLIST
1. The Spirit World 4:57
2. Down To The Marshes 5:21
3. Refugee Blues 6:30
4. Kiss Chase 5:42
5. The Montgomery 5:29
6. Father Thames And Mother London 5:06
7. Robin Reliant 5:39
8. Island State 5:20