Amid the casualties of punk rock’s necessary and thrashing critique of popular culture and music in the mid-seventies was folk rock and psychedelic music, which had blended in so many angry young minds with the era’s MOR meanderings of British Prog. Folk became a bad word, associated with hippies and a bygone era of flared jeans, paisley print button-downs, peace, love and grooviness. As a result, through the eighties and nineties, there wasn’t a finger-picking hit to be found, and folk as a genre was lumped into and filed beside Adult Contemporary at most record store chains: part of your dad’s or your uncle’s embarassing record collection, but not your own.
As with all subcultures, punk was about a search for genuineness, and it formulated a number of hypotheses which suited its DIY ideal, the most significant of which seemed to argue that experience of any musical kind was fraudulent. The famous punk credo was “Here’s three chords. Now form a band.” And there’s a truth in this when it comes to pop music: a genius or an idiot can play three chords and create a three-chord classic. But as much as punk re-opened doors to rock-‘n‘-rolls’ roots, it closed doors on guitar music’s larger origins. And for all its energy, it too is historical now. If you’re like me, you’re as uncomfortable with leftover punks as you are with renaissance festivals and historical reenactments.
Times change, and audiences for music tend to look to their grandparents rather than their parents for guidance. Perhaps we’re all sick of dad’s radio taste on long car rides, or maybe it’s the result of too many eighties nights. I’m not certain. Whatever the reason, folk isn’t such a bad word anymore and has returned to play as a musical genre after a good thirty years away. With other genres of a similar ilk, we’ve been more forgiving: Gram Parsons’ easy strides into ‘Cosmic American Music’ tread the path for REM and Wilco’s neo-country to the charts in the nineties, but the ground covered by Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band has taken longer to return to.
Clocking in at just thirty-two minutes, Mancunian Jane Weaver’s fifth LP is a weird little post-folk experience: an example of what has been shifting the sand of the counterhip away from reckless post-punk guitar bands. The music passes quickly, so that one barely has a hold on a melody before the next segues in. Through the opening buzz of raga-like acoustic warmth, via the pounding title track, the nine tracks meander into deep psych-folk territory—with enough chanting throughout to fully soundtrack a 60s Czech New Wave film. The recording bears little resemblence to Weaver’s previous effort, Cherlokalate (2007), a much more straightforward collection of pop/rock songs.
The Fallen By Watchbird is a conceptual and collaborative project, the songs alluding to a ‘floating story line based around missing seamen, telekinesis, avian messengers, white witchcraft and death & re-birth’, and featuring appearances from genuine sixties psych-folk types, Wendy & Bonnie Flower and Susan Christie, as well as contemporary Welsh-language singer Lisa Jen and traditional Bosnian singer Behar. The songs don’t give much credence to the concept, especially as three of the nine are lyric-less, and it’s only track eight, the prolixly titled ‘My Soul Was Lost, My Soul Was Lost, And No One Saved Me’, with its seashore soundscape opening, eight-bar progression and marching tempo, that conveys anything of the vague narrative. But then there’s enough musical development to trigger other appreciations, and this is easily the most interesting and varied recording Weaver has issued.
Others are working in a similar vein—Philadelphia’s Espers, Brooklyn’s Sharon Van Etten, Bolton’s Voice of the Seven Woods—creating a dark, folk-based music that draws on traditional elements while maintaining a contemporary sound: music for dark autumn or winter evenings. The Fallen By Watchbird, though, is a Mancunian summer record, fit for those long boring sunny or not days full of rain and humidity, the music dark but driving towards a conclusion.