This here isle really does do its folk tradition justice as we continually trudge along the forsaken earth. The Incredible String Band’s kookiness. Jethro Tull’s even kookier fantasies. Richard and Linda Thompson’s music-hall-cum-spiritualist mediations. Laura Marling’s reign over ‘00s nu-folk (and well away from her stomp-clap contemporaries). Richard Dawson’s noise-inflected medieval tales and Little England observations. Hen Ogledd’s… discombobulation? Shovel Dance Collective’s… shanties?
Of course, most of this remains in the underground where it surely belongs, enduring like a pulse we feel compelled to dig up when modern life gets its claws into us. This is right where Crumbling Ghost operate: a long-running London collective that transpose modern trappings onto tried-and-true folk sounds and passed-down aural traditions, except, with added doom / sludge. Oh yes, that which comes down like a combine harvester’s first plough of a centuries’ old hand-worked field.
Four is, incidentally, the fourth outing for the group—continuing to brand folk with their own signature no matter how ‘trad’ the record starts out. Bows Of London, an original conceit, channels Brothers Grimm through Katie Harnett’s descriptive coos of a girl drowning her sibling, pulling in a Miller’s Son (a classic character, that), and making a violin out of the dead sister’s bones and hair. Gruesome stuff. And with a brewing gothic undertone that gets a rumbling treatment of John Mosley and Donny Hopkins’ low-end guitars; truly Crumbing Ghost’s own take on why heavy shit and folklore just works together.
Proving the point, too, is Bill Norrie, a saga-like standard ballad about a young boy beheaded by his unknowing father. Mosley, having seen folk giant Martin Carthy playing it (as Child Maurice, #53 on the Roud Folk Song Index) live once, brought his interpretation to Hopkins who wanted to add Torche-style drop-A riffs into it. That’s exactly what it is. Two worlds colliding unexpectedly, but welcomely.
Such examples show why the band befits the inimitable Roadburn festival, who even decide to get Yes-style proggy on Lovely Joan; albeit it is one of the more forgettable cuts here. What is not forgettable is Valtz Efter Tor Lohne, not far away from mathy post-hardcore despite being a Norwegian oldie. Hey, this is the OG hinterland of Darkthrone and Mayhem we’re talking about after all, and rightly in the band’s own words, it is a ‘banger’. Gower Wassail is similarly an update on a classic—this time of Welsh origin—that manages to emulate the pint-swigging antics of Merry and Pippin’s The Green Dragon in The Return of the King.
Rounding everything out fitting is a full Crumbling Ghost display. The Unquiet Grave has plenty going on besides its tale of prolonged grief: a post-metal Cult Of Luna-like intro, call-and-response between lead vocals and nifty riff runs, and an enveloping darkness emerging from chunky power chords and biting background leads; a nails-on-a-chalkboard effect that sounds way better than that description depicts it.
Four will likely not sell anyone that isn’t mad on weirdo old-timey folk or mire-level guitars, but the band is well-versed enough in their influences to make their own stamp feel earned, and truly gratifying, particularly in the legacy of an unfairly maligned folk blueprint that needs to exist when musical candour may slip away from us fast.
For fans of: OXN, Emma Ruth Rundle, Opeth
‘Four’ by Crumbling Ghost is released on 7th August on New Heavy Sounds.
Words by Elliot Burr
