(2022) Fern Maddie - Ghost Story  


Review:
Vermont-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Fern Maddie fell for British and Irish traditional music in her teens, then inhaled folk songs and began songwriting, encouraged by her composer father. After his early death, she decided to live her life making music in tribute to him in her own curious way. She now makes a podcast about traditional music, Of Song and Bone, writes music in her woodland cabin, tends goats, and documents her life, without embellishment, on Instagram. Ghost Story is Maddie’s powerful, immediate 10-track debut (you can imagine her singing its songs on festival stages, as if early-career Sharon Van Etten had been diverted on to an ancient, rougher road). The mood throughout evokes the dimly lit intimacy of early 2000s albums by Diane Cluck, Emilíana Torrini and Nina Nastasia, with added warmth. Tunes are often carried by banjo or guitar, supported by low strings, the percussive shudder of bones, or on Scottish ballad Ca’ the Yowes, a synthesiser providing a strangely fitting, scratchy counterpoint. Maddie’s young, welcoming voice also makes her an accessible storyteller. This often gives a surprisingly unnerving quality to songs that already hang heavy with horror, something she plays with. As she twists the gender roles in the well-known ballad Hares on the Mountain, turning the maids into hares, and men into the hunters, contemporary US politics barrels into view. Her fantastic, original lyrics unsettle you, too. “Don’t worry, don’t wait around / Just leave me in the ground,” begins the protagonist of Unmarked, before we’re told delicately, terrifyingly, to “take off that winded skin”. Even better is Dorothy May, the tale of a woman who sleeps “on a pillow of salt brine”, then asks if we can hear the trumpets ring out. This album is constantly arresting, emotional and thrilling.


   


Track List:
01 - The Maid On the Shore
02 - Green Grass Growing
03 - Dorothy May
04 - Ca' the Yowes
05 - Hares On the Mountain
06 - Wool Gathering ; Under Snow
07 - Northlands
08 - Unmarked
09 - Catherine Wheel
10 - You Left This


Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, indie-folk
Country: USA
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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