Albums come rarely from Kate Green; each one prompts the wish that they should arrive more often. In any event, A Dark Carnival is a welcome follow-up to An Unkindness Of Ravens. The South Yorkshire-based singer combines traditional songs and covers with her own compositions, in styles that range from modishly electronic folk to jazz and swing.
She opens with “Lady Diamond”, a grim ballad about a princess who falls pregnant by a kitchen-boy, sees him murdered by her father’s men and then dies of a broken heart. The arrangement is a robust concoction of rocking drums and screeching horror-show fiddle, ending on a curiously unresolved note. The other traditional song, “Bows Of London”, is a close cousin of “Cruel Sister”: another princess pushes her younger sister into the Thames to drown; the body is made into a fiddle with bones for pegs and hair for strings; at court, the fiddle plays out its accusation: “Yonder sits my sister Anne/Hey the gay and the grinding/She who drownded [sic] me in the stream.” The song unreels over nearly eight minutes with a dissociated lack of emotion but with the keening of the fiddle swimming steadily up into focus.
Many of the songs have ecology as a central concern. A reading of “When The Levee Breaks” has a dull pulsing drum thump, Green’s voice a bluesy lament some miles from Robert Plant in Led Zeppelin’s version until at the end crunching electric guitars break through. Green’s own composition “Renegades (Of Love And Rage)” is a chatty cha-cha-cha in praise of Extinction Rebellion, set to frills of acoustic guitar and percussion. “We’ll bang you up you fraudsters, big polluters, tax avoiders,” sings Green sweetly. “No do or die, just tell another lie.” Her “Reclaim The Light” is a less precise and more mystical call to action.
Elsewhere — still on the theme of the natural world — there are settings of poems by Burns (“Banks And Braes”) and Kipling (“Cuckoo Song”). Other highlights include the melodically-exquisite celebration of childhood on “Ferodo Bridges” and a tribute to the crew of a wartime Flying Fortress who gave their lives to avoid crashing on children playing in a Sheffield Park on “Mi Amigo”. A wintry whinny of the old, weird north-east can be heard on a cover of Lal Waterson’s “Fine Horseman”, its eerie melody stark as a scarecrow. The album closes with a bracing version of the Caribbean shanty “Shallow Brown”, drums splashing like warm waters and uilleann pipes trilling the responses.
★★★★☆
‘A Dark Carnival’ is self-released
Kate Green puts ecology at the heart of new album ‘A Dark Carnival’
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