Name: Olden Song by The Wharves
Duration: 4 min 37 s
Description: From 2nd Demo EP - Escape from the Tank 2013

This is like being told good news by cherubs.

From 2nd Demo EP - Escape from the Tank 2013

Olden Song

Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career.

Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you’ve never heard. The innate sadness of the songs’ content – the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow – is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall’s pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall’s vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade’s early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group’s hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music.

Rose McDowall’s role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow’s East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: “They're real sad songs, about real life. I've had people come up to me to say I'd connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and  suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, "that's power."

Night School’s issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7” “Don’t Fear The Reaper.”


ROSE MCDOWALL - Cut With The Cake Knife (from Cut With The Cake Knife LSSN027)

(3 of 4)

Recorded by Henry Withers
Mastered by Daniel Husayn
2015 

MEET ME AT THE SOLAR POND

Recorded and Mastered by John Hannon 2015

Painting by Timothy Edward Hill

FREE ALBUM DOWNLOAD: https://joya.bandcamp.com/album/going-postal

YOLK

ABALONE

RELIC GESTURE

Composed and Produced by Ross Blake 
Recorded by Ross Blake & Gaverick de Vis
Mixed and Mastered by @prizumizm

Piano, Harmonium, Bass, Wind, Percussion - Ross Blake 
Guitar - Gaverick de Vis
Drums - Dwight Scruntz 
Violin - Eloise Goulder
Cello - Philip Noyce
Trumpet - Felix Barnes

Mesmeric Fashanu

Let's Transcend

Marion Andrau, Dearbhla Minogue and Gemma Fleet

2016 LP 'Electa' on Gringo Records
2015 7" Single Naz on Upset the Rhythm
2014 LP 'At Bay' on Gringo Records
2013 Split LP on Soft Power Records, Glasgow, 

Contact: thewharves@gmail.com 

GIGS:
http://thewharves.tumblr.com/


Olden Song

The Wharves

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