(2021) Piers Faccini - Shapes of the Fall


Review:
The English-born, French-raised multi-instrumentalist Piers Faccini is in apocalyptic form on his first album in five years. The opening track, “They Will Gather No Seed”, has something of the resonance of Sam Lee’s “The Garden of England (Seeds of Love)”, with its invocation of the wild, the dry snaps of fingers, and the gentleness of the strings setting off the voice of the natural world. “Give me my home back,” he implores. “How bark was my home/when wind/when wind was my bride,” — and the strings turn inside out — “when men tore our flight/from skies far and wide”. There are bluesy cadences of the Maghreb elsewhere: “Foghorn Calling”, with a karkabou rattle from Karim Ziad and his brother Malik’s guembri jostling with Faccini’s oud — the foghorn calling perhaps across the Mediterranean from Puglia to Algeria. The same sonorities run through “Dunya”, the shape-shifting gnawa rhythms now relentless, now yielding to a string quartet on the chorus. The gentle acoustic caress of “Together Forever Everywhere” is belied by the chorus. “Wide was the water, low was the tide,” he croons. “You held me under I held you there,” — and then, finally, “I held you under you pulled me there”. The album’s centrepiece is “All Aboard”, an updating of the story of the Flood, with a rattling rhythm and verses traded between Faccini, the American singer Ben Harper, and the Moroccan trance singer Abdelkebir Merchane, who bursts out of the middle of the song with a prayer for blessing and healing addressed to the Gnawa saint El Fqih. “All aboard,” climaxes the chant, “to the oars and row . . . to the pole we’ll go”. If there is a chance of survival, it is decidedly partial. “Paradise fell on the eighth day,” he sings later. “I want us to grow old; I want us to get through,” as if humanity’s relationship with the planet is barely salvageable. “Abandon ship, abort the code,” he calls on “Firefly”, and again on “Remember Them”, “a little part of me has died”. Gnawa is transcendent music; here, it labours to transcend despair. Faccini ends the album on “The Real Way Out”, singing to acoustic guitar and solo cello. “I wanted to fall or to be reborn/fall or to be reborn,” he muses, trapped between either. The only peace to be found comes in the wordless epilogue, back where it all began, percussion dialogue with slowly lapping strings.





Tracklist:
01 - They Will Gather No Seed
02 - Foghorn Calling
03 - Dunya
04 - Together Forever Everywhere
05 - All Aboard (feat. Ben Harper)
06 - Levante
07 - Lay Low to Lie
08 - The Longest Night
09 - Firefly
10 - Paradise Fell
11 - Remember Them
12 - The Real Way Out
13 - Epilogue


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits