(2019) Eliza Carthy - Restitute


Review:
What do you do when the pay for your band isn’t forthcoming? For Eliza Carthy, it was to make an album that could raise the funds to recompense the Wayward Band for the “monumental con” they endured in 2016. The resulting album is called Restitute. What far better title is there? The first release was a limited 1500 special edition, which very quickly sold out. But now the album is to be released via Topic Records, as it celebrates its 80th anniversary as the oldest independent label in the world and already the first single, Friendship, is out. Restitue is very much a domestic affair with the majority of the tracks recorded in Eliza’s home in Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire. In some ways, it isn’t really important to know where the recordings took place, yet it does explain the feel of the music. Remember coming across a memo in the BBC Archives requesting, for a radio drama production, “the sound of a brown door closing” and whilst most of us would find it difficult to describe it, we would probably know it when we heard it. The same can be said of Restitute. A bedroom provides comfort, safety, and a knowledge that it’s your own territory. Then there are the furnishings that give a specific aural feel, a closeness of texture. This is Eliza’s first solo album of traditional music for fourteen years though as she freely admits that she is not entirely alone on some of the tracks. The set covers a good cross-section of time and style and has an excellent pedigree. The album starts with Friendship, a statement no doubt to those for whom the sales of the original release are to benefit – and a statement perhaps of Eliza setting out her own stall. From then on it is a mix of traditional and not-so-traditional but all that feels right. Ask any singer about what it is they are singing and you are as likely to get as much history about the song and from whom it was learned as you would do about its words. These songs have their lines of descent, their antecedents, and this set is certainly interesting in its range. Dream of Napoleon has been around a long long time and is one of any number of songs about Boney. This one, that Eliza learned from her parents, is sung with old friend and collaborator Jon Boden. Helter Skelter, a solo voice rendition of a Jonathan Swift poem has come out of working with contemporary classical/avant-garde composer David Soldier; The Man Who Puffs The Big Cigar, written by Leon Rosselson, is a 1977 caustic exultation of big money which sounds equally as relevant today, if not more so. Dad Martin Carthy gets a mention with reference to his guitar work on the 1994 recording of The Slave’s Lament/Farewell To A Dark Haired Friend. This version just has the violin and voice of Eliza, a noticeably different Eliza to that of over twenty years ago. Martin does sit in on Peter Bellamy’s The Leaves In The Woodland, from Bellamy’s folk ballad opera The Transports. In some ways this is a cross-generational song for the family as Norma Waterson has sung the Mother and Eliza the Daughter; here Eliza now sings as the Mother. Peter Bellamy had also put the tune to Kipling’s Gentleman Rankers, a song of almost self-pity about chaps of higher birth and education who, disgraced, were forced to enlist as common soldiers despite being of a status that should have earned them a commission. Lady All Skin and Bone and The Old Sexton, respectfully following each other on the playlist, are excellent examples of the eternal fascination of death. Lady All Skin And Bone may be seen as an amusing piece but really shows that death, as Eliza says, is a great “leveller of everyone rich and poor”. Meanwhile, The Old Sexton muses on his own importance by ‘gathering them in’ but then reflects on his own mortality.




Tracklist:
01. Friendship
02. The Leaves in the Woodland
03. Helter Skelter
04. The Man Who Puffs the Big Cigar
05. Gentlemen Rankers
06. The Slave's Lament / Farewell to a Dark-Haired Friend
07. Dream of Napoleon
08. Lady All Skin and Bone
09. The Old Sexton
10. The Last Rose of Summer


Media Report:
Genre: british 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