Folk

 Record Review:  “The Gentle Good” by Gareth Bonello

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Gareth Bonello’s latest album sees him excavating his homeland’s folk classics, interpreting each with drowsy, melancholic voice, guitar, cello and piano

The Gentle Good

The Gentle Good is Cardiff-based folk musician Gareth Bonello, whose musical interests often take him far from home. He has explored the bardic connections between Taoist and druidic storytelling (on 2013’s Y Bardd Anfarwol), and the songs of Welsh Christian missionaries with the Indian musicians affected by them. But Galargan (“lament” in Welsh) sees him burrow into his national identity and history to excavate songs full of longing.

Recording in his kitchen and a cottage in the wild expanses of Mid Wales’s Elan Valley, Bonello has ploughed through the rich song collections of the late Meredydd Evans and Phyllis Kinney at the National Library of Wales, among others, then arranged the chosen tunes for voice, guitar, cello and piano, all played by him. Galargan begins with the softly yielding beauty of Pan Own I Ar Foreddydd (As I Was One Morning), where a blackbird “tuning on the branch” fascinates the protagonist, providing hope in dim light. Nid Wyf Yn Llon (I Am Not Happy) follows, which, with its Morrisseyesque title feels fittingly bleak. A song collected from a drunk prisoner by a jail warden in Dolgellau, its rhythms and melodies drip and pool like a particularly mournful example of Portuguese fado.

Bonello’s voice is as comforting as warm water and honey throughout, wrapping around lilting syllables and so many mesmerising, slow-moving moments. Great, too, is his intricate, woozy guitar playing, descending in golden thickets on Y Bachgen Main (The Slender Lad). Phosphorescent piano lines decorate Beth Yw’r Haf I Mi? (What Is Summer to Me?) as a boy mourns the loss of his love in the blazing sun. This drowsy, melancholic album is perfect for late summer, full of that specific kind of sadness some of us sense as the seasons pass by.

Source: The Gentle Good: Galargan review | Jude Rogers’ folk album of the month

The Wicker Man: 1973 folk-horror endures to this day as a masterpiece of the form

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Free love and folk-singing hides a dark secret on the Scottish island of Summerisle in a film that’s bracing, exciting and downright funny

By Shaad D’Souza

Have you seen the horror film about a gormless, well-intentioned westerner lured to a lush, sparsely populated isle in search of meaning, only to find paganism, unbridled sexual politics, folk dancing and abject violence?

I’m not talking about Midsommar, the 2019 folk-horror hit by auteur Ari Aster that freaked out audiences with its broad-daylight senicide and twee ritualism. I’m referring to a film that came out nearly 50 years earlier, and which often out-weirds and out-wilds its younger cousin despite containing none of the gore or violence. I’m talking about The Wicker Man, the 1973 British horror-musical that popularised the folk-horror genre, and endures to this day as a masterpiece of the form.

Directed by Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man is a strange but essential B-movie artefact, one which has, over the past 20 years, been reclaimed as a masterpiece of British cinema and now has a home on prestige streaming platform Mubi. Starring Edward Woodward and iconic 60s actress and sex symbol Britt Ekland, the film follows police sergeant Neil Howie who receives an anonymous tip that a young girl has gone missing on the far-off Scottish island of Summerisle.

When he arrives, he finds that he’s bitten off far more than he can chew. Not only are the island’s residents cheerily working together to obfuscate the details of what happened to the girl, they also seem to have given up on Christianity entirely – worshipping pagan gods and conducting a sinister masked procession on May day.

The devoutly Christian sergeant is appalled – villagers roaming naked and having sex in the lush fields, churchyards overrun with wildlife and entirely devoid of Christian symbology, school lessons on the phallic origins of the maypole, and a suave, smartly dressed lord, played by Christopher Lee, who rules in place of an elected official. Most sinister of all is that despite their wide grins and penchant for song and dance, Howie is pretty certain the missing girl has been given up as a human sacrifice in exchange for an abundant harvest.Devoid of any “traditional” horror devices – jump scares, gore and the like – The Wicker Man instead asks viewers to draw their own conclusions about the traditions of Summerisle. (As with Midsommar, I found the supposedly barbaric villagers to be sympathetic and perversely reasonable, but the film allows for any number of interpretations while still being straightforward and accessible, one of its greatest formal triumphs.) What transpires over the course of the film is unsettling and often bizarre, but also poses salient questions about tradition, judgment and moral relativism. And it does it all in a breezy, evenly paced 88 minutes. Although sometimes arcane in its references, I cannot express how bracing, exciting and downright funny a first watch of The Wicker Man is.

Source: The Wicker Man: 1973 folk-horror endures to this day as a masterpiece of the form