Suffused with a dreamtime chill-out post-rock folktronica atmosphere and stream of consciousness lyrics, 'Fable' channels pandemic anxiety and tensions into a journey into memory, self, relationships, nature and, ultimately, the light.
Their third album since expanding to a four piece, this was born of hours of improvisation during an on the hoof recording session in Dorset Mill Farm Studio following the cancellation of a gig, melodies, rhythms and lyrics emerging spontaneously. Sharing a similar whisperingly sung, musically atmospheric post-rock chill-out wash of synths, keys, and strings as his production of Chris Cleverley’s new album, it melds jazz, folk and art-rock colours into a hypnotic miasma.
Album opener, ‘Far Gone’, is anchored by Alison D’Souza’s melancholic violin as John Patrick Elliott sketches a reflective musing on the past and what lies ahead:
Been a while Sleepy stranger Since we two Hopscotched drunk By the Lea And in my palm Was your song I felt the future Wasn’t too far gone Now I feel a change Coming on Maybe we’re not So far gone As we once thought.
Inspired by Hemmingway’s ‘The Old Man And The Sea’, anchored by Tim Heymerdinger’s hollow tribal drumbeats and a pulsing mood of tension, ‘Went Out Too Far’ conjures thoughts of prowling Pink Floyd as he sings about pushing the limits:
Wanted to test myself Wanted to lose my breath Wanted my heart to burst Under the tumbling earth Touching perhaps on narcotics in Orpheus slit and spilled In a tiny plastic pill
before reaching the overreaching conclusion of the title.
Further exploring the push and pull between reality and dream worlds, the title track is cast as a jazz infused fever dream stream of consciousness that, the bass line reminding me of Tubular Bells, captures a sense of chaos and anxiety:
This is the heat of the sun And this is our boiling voice Scorching the night And the lullaby-sickly lies With the menacing imagery of Something set free to Swallow debris And clay
And of our lives, a fable:
Erased A thousand times And gone to waste.
Bubbling like tar pits, Mariya Brachkova’s synths underpin the ethereal drifting ‘Real To You At Least’ with its sparse piano notes and almost hymnal vocals with a lyric on a theme of ageing and trying to hold on to who you were:
Got to lose myself Remind me how to dance in the fire and noise Got my ‘90s moves Sands of time crackling down your naked thighs Can you feel the scummy river lapping at your heart? Well it’s too soon to say Did we get away with all those spilled-ink nights at the old place?
But, here tethered to love, accepting rather than succumbing to mid-life crisis:
We are golden now Glad to be the middle ground between the saints and the sinful Not simple But it’s all I can do to stay real to you, at least.
The lyrics can often be obtuse, suggesting rather than stating, impressionistic in their imagery, Elliott drawing on Green mythology, Orpheus in an earlier song and in ‘How Will We Catch Them Out’ referencing Lethe, the river of oblivion in the underworld where the dead drank to forget memories of their lives:
On the subway station floor My veins were tracks all warped and worn And I tell you, when you get down Lethe-low You can dream as deep as gold.
The second half leads off with the drone intro and strings scoring of ‘Wake Up Call’, a re-entry into existence and connections:
My firefly love Shooting straight For your heart You’re the sibling Of every single Living thing I see you As you are
Floydian shades return for the rumbling, inexorable marching rhythm of the part-spoken dirge blues ‘Big Red’ which (conjuring thoughts of Wordsworth’s Prelude) tells of a metaphorical mountain rising from the ground to eclipse everything and again, caught up in millennial dread where:
All the moments you’ve missed Eat you up like a riddle And what doesn’t exist Can cut you through the middle.
It concerns a need to reconnect with self and others:
To restart the memory Relearn the way the heart burns.
Those of a poetic bent might discern the influence of Yeats’ forebodings in:
All the things you felt With your fizzing senses As you moved, light and loving Along the knife-edge world You can just about face it now The spiralling smoke From your lover’s throat And the gathering storm That you are wide open to now The dream made flesh In your thundering chest And the imagination turns Like a slow glow worm Beneath the carbon moon
Set to a slow but steady rhythm that reflects the title, ‘One Step At A Time’ is again hard to pin down in interpreting the sea imagery of lyrics like:
She always saw defiance As a burning act of love Listened to the sea Draw in an icy breath, she said I will be the sailor And the siren all at once, I’m already knee-deep in love With someone else’s death
and
She woke the white horses To slam through her chest She dreamed her days dissolving In a storm of sand and salt breath You live to sniff the sinking depths I suck the rising sun She raged against the waves To feel the body come undone
Or the apocalyptic shiver to:
To look her dead in the eye As a shadow black as oil Spilled across the old sea wall I have touched nothing She said the words aloud ‘We all saw this coming And not one answered the call
If drinking from Lethe can leave you comfortably numb, ‘Vibrant Life’ is a call to not lose touch with our momentum, imagination and curiosity in dark times, opening with the lines:
I’m alive, I’m alive And I’m trying to stay mystified By the violent life out there When I’m a creature far from home Far flung from anywhere
And, peppered with suitably violent imagery, alluding to ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ in a call to himself to not become one of the emotionally living dead:
I’m seeking a vibrant life A vibrant life Within my own Tin can chest
The existential purgatory of:
Being alive And never really knowing it
All captured in a vision of:
All the buttoned-up bodies Moving slow like sorrow Through the glacial streets The glacial streets We called home
It reaches the end of the dreaming with, first, the nervy minimalist narcotic funk of ‘Night Train’ where, losing self-contact, he’s:
Just spinning out Of this world I knew I’d never know Myself well enough to last
And journeying through a world frozen and frightening:
Quiet life dies hard and we try We try, we try to live gently I can’t always tell if the struggle Is a dream, is a dream And the animals far off in the forest Start to scream, start to scream
It closes with the unsettling, meditative piano lullaby of ‘Sleep Tight’ and imagery of lying in the ocean, drowned to life as:
Tiny fish pick your mind clean
But then it switches mood and gently swells to rebirth and starting anew, sleep’s balm easing away the cares to reenergise us for the waking day:
A dream is no shut-down time We come back out swinging and alive To tear down this boy’s frontline And hand the fire on To those who give life A day at a time
Born of the pandemic and lockdown’s isolation, ‘Fable’ is an album to immerse in and let the music and the words seep through your pores, taking you deep into its dreamtime and journeying with it back into the light.