ARM36
Released: Monday 6th May 2013
CD / DL

I Cannot Sing You Here, But For Songs Of Where is the third full-length album from Thirty Pounds Of Bone.

The record sees songwriter Johny Lamb further explore his continuing theme of place. Split into four separate locations; (past place, the place of heritage, present place and the in between), the record aims to articulate experiences of itinerancy and second-generation migrancy.

Throughout these songs, Johny adopts, appropriates and abuses forms of traditional music, with the hybridity that has previously gained him much praise from critics.

His take on a Veesik (a lost form of Shetland song), backed by a drone built from accordion and the machines used by boat builders (of Hays Dock in Lerwick), exemplifies this.

‘Mother This Land Won’t Hold Me’, begins as an unaccompanied Sean Nós Ballad that gradually abstracts to a dense, distortion-led climax.

Elsewhere we find him buckling under the relentless momentum of touring in ‘The Streets I Staggered Down’, with no end in sight, and nowhere meaningful to go back to when the end finally comes. In ‘The Snow in Kiel’, the flatlands of Western Europe flash past him as he goes from gig to gig, never quite catching up with himself.

Johny makes no claim on any of these territories, admitting his spurious involvement with each as the songs progress. In the true account of attempting to visit his mother’s childhood home in ‘The Ballad of Cootehill’, only to find it long since demolished, he sings, ‘But I am not the man to say that we are from Cootehill.’ This song furthers the sense of dislocation in the familiar folksong theme of Irish migration, from a sense of missing home, to the sense of never having seen it in the first place.

The album closes with ‘The Wolf on the Shelf’, set against the sound of a storm beating against the static caravan Johny lives and works in. This is a love song for home, which Lamb has decided is a state brought about by a proximity to cherished possessions, regardless of where they happen to be.

I Cannot Sing You Here, But For Songs of Where features several guests including Darren Hayman (Hefner), Al Nero and Scott Maple (Le Reno Amps), Jen Macro (Something Beginning With L), Irish box player Seamus Harahan, and Laurence Collyer (Diamond Family Archive). Thirty Pounds of Bone’s song-writing reflects Johny’s opinion that the folk song must change for its time, and his idea that the unreconstructed performance of heritage is at root, only that; an empty gesture towards a past that belongs to no one living.  All of the music that weaves through his life is allowed entry into his songs, and the result owes as much to various trends in popular music as it does to folk, giving him a sound that is at once highly contemporary and trans-historical.

“A Virgin train, then a bus to the Airport, the branded jet across the Irish Sea to the third home made studio of the week, as I tie down the loose and sparse collection of musicians I need to help me make these recordings. Reading on the train takes the form of hysterical dystopian Marxism, and violent rhetoric concerning postmodernism. How strong the disagreements of theorists as the trees and rivers remain, how furious the dialogical yells as the cliffs and hills I pass stand unswayed by any argument.

I lock eyes with an uncaring crow at Newton Abbot and neither he nor the town are worried about the great sadness of late capitalism. But the debris is everywhere. And there I am, so embedded in both worlds, the landscape of woodland and rock, of arable crop and marsh, and too the motorways and hyper-markets, I play gigs understanding their role in the selling of physical and digital product. I photograph a pastoral scene on a smart phone adding a digital filter that makes the image appear to be old and analogue. Embedded in, but not wholly a part of. How could anyone be?

I know more people in the city I am going to, where I have never made any kind of home, than I do in the village I live in. That seems strange to me. I have known only one person who lived and died in the place they were born. The people I know who are the most committed verbal Marxists, are the most successful networkers and sellers of cultural artefacts. We are surrounded by paradox, contradiction and isolation, but this is not new or frightening, but simply the culture in which I have grown up.

That artworks should be full of self-reference, mockery, irony, sarcasm is hardly surprising. I wonder if the disparate band of musicians playing in different rooms at different times might constitute some idea of collective or community, even a folk? I consider that the answers must lie somewhere between reconciling philosophy on a mountain and buying donuts in a Tesco metro.” - Johny Lamb, Oct 2011

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - The Streets I Staggered Down

Thirty Pounds of Bone sings Chris T-T on an EP of cover versions released on Woodland Recordings. Songs by The Electric Soft Parade, Mary Hampton, The Great Park, Something Beginning With L, Le Reno Amps and Dive Dive also feature on this beautifully quiet and affectionate collection.
Available on limited CD at http://www.woodlandrecordings.com/RELEASES/WR046.html
More from Thirty Ponds of Bone at http://www.thirtypoundsofbone.bandcamp.com

WR046 - Thirty Pounds of Bone 'Ankles (Chris T-T)'

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THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - The Streets I Staggered Down

Armellodie

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