I’m not a music critic, so this should be fun.
Yesterday I spent the entire day working in my garden. I’m moving out of the flat soon, and my landlord expressed the desire for the garden to be clearer than it was. I didn’t have the strength to really protest that, so I did my best. I pulled up weeds which had grown between the cracks of the paving stones, and I swept the ugly artificial grass best I could, given that it was covered in pigeon shit and loose feathers. It is rare to find any garden space this close to central London, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. But it’s ugly. There’s an open drain which the sink from the hairdressers above me drains into; it clogs with hair and product sometimes and I have to pull it all out with gloves – the clump of foul-smelling waste often feels halfway to becoming something alive when I hold it in my hands. The drain attracts flies. The drain smells. I can’t have my back door open to air out the flat because of this. What’s the point of having an outside if you can’t enjoy the fresh air? Well, the air wouldn’t be fresh regardless. This is London after all.
After I was done, I went to see Cinder Well perform at MOTH Club in Hackney. Cinder Well is an experimental folk project led by Amelia Baker that started off heavily influenced by doom music but has since transformed into what I would describe as something more traditionally folk-y – this change has, interestingly, happened whilst Baker herself has moved from California to Ireland. The Irish folk influence was there before – the previous album No Summer, which is a masterpiece, charts the movement between those two settings. But Cinder Well’s newest album, Candance, is full of the sorts of emotions that one might come across being played all over rural Ireland, and the presence of California has faded further into the background, sometimes showing up but never staying for long. I am no expert on folk music, but I would love to immerse myself more in the genre. This time last year I went to see Emma Ruth Rundle (not exactly a folk musician, but one influenced by doom in much the same way as Amelia Baker was) play her album Engine of Hell in full in a basement lit with candles. Something about this time of year brings me to want to sit and listen to something mournful. Audiences at gigs like this can be frustrating. I don’t think people are accustomed to sitting and listening to live music. They cannot sing along, or dance, or call out. It’s also something I’ve come across when seeing films recently – I went to see The Nun II and a group of young people on the same aisle as my seemed incapable of not looking at their phones the entire time. At the risk of sounding old, I just don’t get it. You’ve paid to be here, why not just enjoy what is happening in front of you? Is your attention span that fucked?
The instrumentation at the Cinder Well gig was stripped completely – just a guitar, sometimes electric sometimes not, and a fiddle. Baker’s beautiful voice rules the whole thing. It’s hard to think of a singer I’ve seen in recent years with such haunting power. It remains distinctively California when everything else seems to now be shunning that place. Most of the songs played were from her new album, although she performed the title track from No Summer and ended on the truly heartbreaking From Behind the Curtain. Hearing that song live was something approaching a revelation. I’ve been having a hard time lately. I’m more emotionally raw than usual. I cried, and I was glad to cry. Particularly these lines were what hit me. I can’t really say much more than quoting them here, they say it all.
I know your father shot himself and you were not told
you sought the city for a man to make the bed that we have now
and I’m here to tell you that the world is epic and wrong
and we are called many things, and at the whims of what we’re calledI write to you