American roots music thrives on independent labels such as Washington DC’s Free Dirt, home to the likes of Jake Blount and Anna & Elizabeth: artists who use traditional archives and instruments to tell alternative stories about our present and future. But it is Cinder Well, AKA multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker, who could be the label’s breakout star.
Her earlier work included earthy arrangements of Appalachian songs and Roud ballads, but on Cadence she is more interested in mythological expanses of poetry and sound than stormier swells of texture and drone. The album explores her love for the sea, as befits an artist who lives between her Pacific-side US birthplace and her adopted home town in coastal County Clare. She sings about it compellingly, in a strangely soft, mid-range rasp, like a peculiar cousin of Laura Veirs.
Two Heads, Grey Mare kicks off the album, a song ostensibly about selkies – seals that turn human on arrival on the land – not that Baker’s lyrics make that obvious. “Crick in the side of a frozen moon,” darts out her opening line, full of fire, before she takes us delving into lakes and caves, tracing hunted shadows. Nature occupies the magical-realist realm she conjures. On Overgrown, fingerpicked guitar shudders with reverb, as strands of hair “now golden, grey, multiply and dominate the forest”. Within the hazy rhythms of Crow, the bird has “a word” with our protagonist, before she wakes in a “waterfall / In a hole in the middle of it all”.
The string arrangements by Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada deepen the mysteries within, but Cadence’s tenor of slowness and lushness sometimes gets suffocating. When Baker strains her opening vocal on Well on Fire, or hums eerily on the title track, the moments of danger and surprise are welcome. Nevertheless, this album of deep ideas and ambitions should dare many to wade with it into the water.
Also out this month
Working with kora master Jali Fily Cissokho and concertina player Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, Somerset singer Reg Meuross’s Stolen from God (Hatsongs Records) is an ambitious, often unsettling song cycle about the toxic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, based on four years of research into oral histories, family trees and church records. Bisarr are Nicholas Konradsen and James Noble, a duo who bonded over heavy Swedish and Danish folk after meeting at a medieval music festival. Their eponymous debut (self-released) is full of nervy, thrilling energy from instruments such as the oud, cittern and jaw harp. BBC Radio 2 Folk award winner Lucy Farrell’s debut album We Are Only Sound (Hudson Records) is a quirky, moving set of originals recorded in the medieval surrounds of Much Wenlock Abbey, home to Nick Drake’s sister Gabrielle. Farrell plays Nick’s guitar and piano throughout, mesmerisingly toying with ideas of intimacy and space.
• This article was amended on 17 April 2023 because an earlier version gave the incorrect surname for Amelia Baker, AKA Cinder Well.
