James Yorkston & the Second Hand Orchestra—The Wide, Wide River (Domino)
Photo by Nadja Hallstrom
If you’ve spent much time with James Yorkston’s spare, quiet folk music, the opening rush of “Ella Mary Leather” may come as a bit of a surprise. The cut is full of urgent piano patter, insistent drums and slashing, swooping strings. Its staccato, speeding cadences argue more for a certain kind of Brit pop than traditional folk, even if its title does name check a celebrated song catcher.
Yorkston’s music, in general, is the very definition of a slow burner, his melodies adorned in only the gentlest ways, his voice rueful and blurred with Scottish vowels. The songs often feel like they must have been discovered rather than written, quietly burnished but not overthought. Yet here on The Wide, Wide River, Yorkston has filled out his worn-in, unassuming songcraft with lush, up tempo arrangements, rather successfully as it happens.
That’s largely due to his collaboration with the Swedish Second Hand Orchestra, a loose-knit collaborative overseen by Karl Jonas Winqvist. Wingvist assembled his group from friends and fellow musicians and asked them all to pick a new, out-of-the-ordinary instrument instead of their primary ones. Band members picked out an array of eccentric axes, including bass harmonicas, indian banjos and obscure toy keyboards etc., and used them to create fanciful sonic landscapes. Their main project, before this, was a documentary soundtrack (whose documentary, unfortunately, was never finished). You can listen to it on bandcamp; it is playful, imaginative and very, very rhythmic. It explains a lot about Yorkston’s new, more communal, propulsive aesthetic.
“Ella Mary Leather” is, perhaps, the punchiest of these songs, but even languid, lyrical ballads like “Too Soothe Her Wee Bit of Sorrow” are expanded and syncopated and complicated. Yorkston croons the song’s octave-spanning hook placidly enough, but an acoustic bass is shaking the foundations under him the whole time, while bristling percussion percolates and string instruments saw forceful cadences. It dances as much as it soothes.
The album has a loose, comfortable feel, as if songs are still being knocked into shape on the fly. Before he kicks off the locomotive groove of “Struggle,” Yorkston casually inquires, “Are we recording?” They are, though there’s a free-wheeling, headlong carom in the music that suggests they have been improvising not too long ago.
Yorkston says the songs are thinly veiled portraits of people he’s known and situations from the past. There’s a retrospective air to most of them. “Ella Mary Leather,” for instance, is not about the folklorist, but rather about a girl that got away. “A Very Old Fashioned Blues” seems to be a memory sketch about people struggling with addiction. There are some piercing lines, “And you Amy, how little did you know that, we shared no bedroom just lipstick regret and cigarettes” for instance, but the narrative is hard to follow. You catch yourself wondering what exactly is going on in the song. There’s a lot of ambiguity. And yet the rush of group vocals, the swell of music, the sparkling bits of blues guitar (or mandolin?), sweep you up and away so that it doesn’t exactly matter.
Yorkston’s collaboration with the Second Hand Orchestra seems especially fruitful, giving him a jolt, shake them out of his usual tricks and proclivities and opening up new possibilities. If the stories don’t quite scan, the musical more than makes up for it, carrying you past the sense of this music into a restless, moving, non-verbal understanding of what the artists are going for.
Har verkligen sett fram emot nytt med den här orkestern, ända sedan förra kom, men framförallt sedan jag såg dem tillsammans med James Yorkston för några veckor sedan. Förtjusande svajiga Moondog-liknande små symfonier.
Vinyl för runt 200 kronor, köpt på Bandcamp.
