Three outstanding voices and a cello create an intoxicating cocktail of folk, jazz and blues on a debut EP that marks the start of a hugely promising career.
Hailing from the East Anglian and Welsh wildlands, taking their name from the ancient folk healers, somewhere between Lady Maisery and Daphne’s Flight, Wise Woman are a power folk quartet comprising music theatre director and singer Anna Pool who’s worked with Opera North, the Welsh National Opera and The Royal Opera House, jazz vocalist Lydia Bell, South Wales-born singer and actress Charlotte Vaughan and cellist Maddie Cutter whose CV includes The Nest Collective.
Together, with additional strings by Anna Brigham, Francesca Gilbert and Sophie Belinfante, they create both dark and pastoral atmospheric folk while also drawing on their individual influences to a varied and intoxicating soundscape.
Their debut EP opens with a drone and the sparse, darkling solo vocals of ‘Fen Woman’, the opening lines serving as scene setter:
Wild walks the fen woman She walks in beauty and in light. Wild walks the fen woman A pocket full of shadows round, and round again. Where the waters lie I will take a cup of tin
Before the other voices, pizzicato strings and heavy piano notes join in and, swelling to a discordant storm, unfolds as a 17th century witch women’s incantation :
I will take a cup of tin That weaves the silver welkin in. And now the light is wearing thin. Will I awaken all my dreams and sins and times of asking? promising their daughters will forever be seen and heard. Know that I am time and I will move the mountains, part the oceans, Be creation singing
Conjuring a medieval setting perhaps, ‘Lay Low’ is a softer proposition with its repeated rippling acoustic guitar pattern, cello and hand percussion framed as a mother’s reflection on parenthood:
I kissed you when you drew the world beneath a starlit sky I cradled you from earth to earth in clothes of endless flight
As she questions her son’s hazardous life choices and essentially tell him to keep his head down.
The three voiced accompanied only by intermittent jazzy plucked cellos phrases, as the title suggests ‘Storyville’ heads to New Orleans, evoking the city’s 1900s underbelly where:
Folks know where the good times go.
A smoky and sensual jazz blues vocal arrangement enfolds a lyric inspired by E.J Bellocq’s sex worker portraits:
Smoke curls from the lips of the harlequin girl. In a papered parlour on a red light row. Yes Sir, that’s a picture of my mother. She won’t let me stay, but she knows where I go
And a reference to ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ before time rushes on and:
One day, Storyville was swept away For a red brick jungle and a Superdome
But it’s still haunted by whispers of its old ghosts and:
The voices of wisdom Carrying down on the wind to carry you home
Opening with acapella scat before piano, strings and apparently a shaky rice pot arrive, folk colours fused into Pool and Vaughan’s music theatre background with spoken lines, it ends with ‘River Song’, a rallying-cry to all women to pay no need to the patriarchy’s patronising:
Be patient for Rome wasn’t built in a day. And be grateful for all the concessions made: Be reminded when looking at them look at where we are now
Rather they need to seize their futures:
Saddle these horses for I am done. No more the vessel of a gilded man. March to the sound of a beating drum no more the song of a gilded man and run free like a river, no longer afraid that I live in a state of unbroken, continually wonderful rage
A highly auspicious debut, it will be interesting to see how they spin out their ‘Thread’ in the months to come.