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Ik moet zeggen dat dit album een vondst is. Prachtige, ingetogen muziek die onder folk zou kunnen vallen, whatever, maar ik voelde me meteen buitengewoon op mijn gemak met deze muziek. Poëzie op muziek gezet, en hoe. 

Als je het artikel hieronder leest terwijl je luistert denk ik dat je begrijpt wat ik bedoel. En daarna gewoon weer luisteren. Een aanrader van formaat.


Songs inspired by the land. The beauty and the concrete, the mysteries and the folklore. An album about family, childhood and the memories that landscapes invoke.

In 2019, friends in music Emma Thorpe, Matt Hill ,and Huw Costin came together to write songs about the land. Working under the guidance of psychogeographers Jane Samuels and Dr. Morag Rose they made a plan to explore edge-lands and barren fields. That journey, to nowhere in particular, is tracked on their debut album, the eponymously titled The Low Drift.

Inspired by the English folk and poet musicians of their youths – Julian Cope, Robert Calvert, Kate Bush - they travelled beyond the Keep Out signs, to the ancient green lanes and sunken tracks where our ancestors buried their bones. The music they found there is natural and elemental, even stark in places with Thorpe's haunting voice taking the lead on Deadwood against a backdrop of primitive 70's TV flute-synth – “I saw comets, fields burning, earth turning, clay furroughs in ancient ground”. It's a song that wouldn't seem out of place on a Twin Peaks Soundtrack or the Fuzzy Felt Folk compilation.

Elsewhere the album features shimmering 12 string guitars, minimalist folk picking, echoing electric and primitive synths sounds straight out of children's TV that scarred a generation in the 1970's and 80's. But this is no retrospective nostalgia fest, on the John Martyn influenced 'Come Alive A Second Time' Costin evokes the present day home of his father in the South Wales valleys. With a narrow bleak focus, the song mirrors the changing physical geography of the valleys with the declining health of the last generation of coal miners.

These are songs that speak of ancient mysteries just below the concrete. Hill spent his formative years as a member of the ‘Ley Hunter Society’, obsessed with earth energies, dowsing and mystery lights in the skies. On the song Gift of Unknown Things, wrapped in haunting three part harmonies, he evokes the "old chalk figures and standing stones, fairy paths and spirit roads"

Costin explains “...where we tried to write epic - we could only stumble towards the personal, and where we tried to write history – we could only heed the warnings in the weather, and where we tried to understand - we could only find soliloquies – and arrive nowhere in particular...”

This album is a soundtrack to that journey.

Tracklist:
1 Deadwood (4:22)
2 Come Alive (a Second Time) (5:01)
3 Everything Flows (2:12)
4 Then the Rain Came (2:20)
5 Breezeblocks (4:25)
6 Bleaklow (2:53)
7 Us and the Water (3:40)
8 A Gift of Unknown Things (3:41)
9 Monyash (3:24)

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen.