(2021) Sally Anne Morgan - Cups


Review:
Whether as one half of House and Land alongside Sarah Louise Henson, working with Appalachian old-time revivalists Black Twig Pickers, or on her various solo albums, multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan suffuses the tenets of musical traditionalism with her own spin. While obviously reverential to the lineage, there’s always been a sense that she’s happiest tampering with the canon, flying the flag for folk music’s recharged relevancy via shrewd mutation. Her latest collection, Cups, is no exception. In stark contrast to the effervescent and almost pop-tinged adventures found on 2020’s Thread, here she whittles down her back-porch fiddle-tunes to their barest fragmented bones. The gentle ebb-and-flow of tentatively bowed strings and luminous glockenspiel entwine on the engaging opening cut, “Night Window,” setting out Morgan’s minimalist stall for much of what follows. On “Hori Hori,” for instance, reinvigorated remnants of 1960s British acid-folk, reshaped and stringently pared back, gather like lost sketches from The Wicker Man soundtrack before the momentum finally builds via arpeggiated bouts of taut banjo and rippling acoustic guitar. Elsewhere, tracks verge on skeletal transpositions of the deep raga rituals of Virginian drone-masters Pelt, themselves long-term Morgan associates. Handbells, tambura, and the distinctive ligneous croak of a wooden frog coalesce into an entrancing bucolic séance, a quasi-supernatural communique transmitting deeply appreciable deistic beauty.





Track Listing:
1.Night Window 02:44
2.Prune 05:28
3.Hori Hori 05:20
4.Pythagoras 05:07
5.Sandbox 05:05
6.Through the Threshold 05:07
7.Home Soup 05:29
8.Angeline 05:39


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Country: USA
Recorded date: 2021
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