Album review: James Yorkston and the Big Eyes Family Players

Published on Sunday 2 August 2009 21:53

JAMES YORKSTON & THE BIG EYES FAMILY PLAYERS: FOLK SONGS **** DOMINO, £10.76

RATHER than search for some evocative title like that of his last album, When the Haar Rolls In, James Yorkston has gone for the say-what-you-hear option with Folk Songs, an album of traditional songs which influenced his transition from just another guitarist in a rock band to one of the most respected and influential singer/songwriters on the Scottish indie-folk scene.

Since emerging from Fife's DIY Fence Collective earlier this decade, Yorkston has produced four albums of spectral beauty and country-folk canters, scattered with his versions of old standards. Of his peers, only Glasgow's Alasdair Roberts embraces the traditional folk ballad with such fidelity, yet both singers remain on the fringes of the folk establishment – and probably like it that way.

This limited-edition album makes explicit the affinity he feels for this music through its selection of songs from around the British Isles. It is also his tribute to singers such as Shirley Collins, Lal Waterson, Christy Moore and particularly Anne Briggs, whose recordings of these tunes originally steered Yorkston towards the folky direction of his solo career.

Displaying some left-field perversity, Yorkston has consigned his usual backing band, the Athletes, to the subs' bench for the moment and has collaborated instead with the Big Eyes Family Players, a Sheffield ensemble led by James Green, a man who admits knowing little about folk music. This, one feels, may have been part of the attraction for Yorkston, though the results of their collaboration have the ring of authenticity, sculpting a beautifully understated backing from guitar, organ, whistles, harmonium and feather-light female backing vocals.

The songs Yorkston has chosen are all firmly in the storytelling tradition, and are set in English forests, on Irish coastlines and at Spanish fiestas, with poaching and cross-dressing as recurring subjects (though never in the same song – now that really would be an interesting sub-genre). Love, foolish, tragic or otherwise, inevitably gets a look-in too.

Hills of Greenmoor, a song from Northern Ireland evoking classic folk themes of wild, beautiful nature and bloody death, describes the hunting of a hare from the point of view of the hunter and the hunted who laments poignantly: "Last night as I lay content in the glen, it was little I thought about dogs or of men."

The lo-fi arrangement is typical of the album. Yorkston accompanies himself on spare acoustic guitar and on occasion is joined by the squeak of a violin and distant tambourine. Just as the Tide was Flowing, a fragile pastoral about maids in May and the rhythm of life, possibly dates back as far as the 17th century, but is also delivered in skeletal, haunting Fence Collective tradition.

Recent single Martinmas Time is a hypnotic rendering of the tale of a resourceful farmer's daughter who dresses as a soldier to get the better of lustful men and preserve her maidenhood, while in Sovay the heroine cross-dresses as a highwayman in order to test the mettle of her lover. Despite the favourable outcome, there is a mournful atmosphere to Yorkston's take on this Babooshka-like morality tale.

Yorkston supplies his own melody and arrangement to the Irish song Mary Connaught and James O'Donnell. A skiffly rhythm, organ, violin and bassy backing vocals contribute to the full-bodied sound. Another Irish tune, I Went to Visit the Roses, is also typical of his original material, as he zips breezily through the ambiguous story of man on the run who colludes with a local lass to escape detection.

Thorneymoor Woods is the first of two poaching songs concerning a battle of wits between locals and gamekeepers. Yorkston's nonchalant vocal is in keeping with its sympathetic portrayal of the poachers as young lads up to a bit of mischief. It's lighter in tone than Rufford Park Poachers, a 19th century song based on a real showdown in Lincolnshire, which has a more unfortunate outcome.

Absorbing though these songs are, the album benefits in dynamics when it skips from the English shires to Galicia. The sprightly instrumental Pandeirada de Entrimo is a processional tune, which wouldn't sound out of place on The Wicker Man soundtrack.

Little Musgrave is one of the ballads collected in the 19th century by Francis James Child. Its protracted tale of temptation, infidelity, betrayal and murder exists in many different musical forms; Yorkston's version is steeped in melancholy. There is a happier, and pithier, take on love on the closing Low Down in the Broom: boy meets girl (in titular location), declares undying love, roll credits.

Although some Yorkston fans may regard this album as merely marking time until his next collection of original material is released, they might be surprised just how seamlessly its themes and textures feed into the rest of his catalogue.