(2022) Katie Spencer - The Edge of the Land  


Review:
The Edge of the Land, Yorkshire native Katie Spencer’s second album proper and follow up to the acclaimed Weather Beaten, was cut live in two days, with a quartet of players fleshing out Katie’s assured acoustic picking. The sound has touches of jazz from the beginning, with Tom Mason’s double bass providing rounded but spare low notes, working beautifully with Arran Ahmun’s subtle drums and grounding Katie’s guitar. The sound palette is a quietly interesting one, with neat yet understated percussion cutting through the melodies. The pace throughout is deliberately leisurely, with the opening song ‘Take Your Time’ hinting at the mood of the album. All of this gives the quality of the music and the lyrics space to shine through. Katie is a gifted writer,her songs full of sharply acute lines, like ‘Rolls and rolls of barbed wire waves / years and years of industry fades’ on the title track, packing meaning into few words. Also inspiring is Nathan Bray’s flugelhorn peppering the set. His long mournful notes framing the quiet optimism of Silence on the Hillside (‘it’s deserted down in the valley / people with family sharing quiet stories at home’) are beautiful and add extra dimensions to Katie’s delicately ambiguous words, giving the song depth and a sense of hidden melancholy. Less opaque in its meaning is Wormhole, a piano-led song documenting gratitude for the strength we can attain through support. The arrangement here is lighter, with Katie’s capoed guitar playing subtle harmonics and a bright and sparkling melody. Some more shade to this light comes from songs like Shannon Road, which uses a simple and calmly played melody to frame an autumnal tune with an edge of sadness. Again, it is clever writing, with the claustrophobia of small-town life blending with the emptiness of loss. This small tune, sang unpretentiously, is a good example of the maturity and quality of Katie’s output. This is beautifully written and played music, with the quiet consistency and confidence in its performers of some of Laura Marling’s best work. The Edge of the Land is an album that doesn’t feel the need to over-embellish its sound; it has the spontaneity that live performance captures combined with arrangements that are unfussy but interesting and quietly adventurous. Wonderful stuff; let this one live with you for a while to discover its powers.


         


Track List:
01 - Take Your Time
02 - The Edge of the Land
03 - Silence On the Hillside
04 - Roads
05 - Bear's Tune
06 - Shannon Road
07 - Wormhole
08 - Go Your Way
09 - Sweet and Gentle
10 - Forevermore


Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, folk-rock
Country: Yorkshire, UK
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


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