The Rheingans Sisters
The Rheingans Sisters: Start Close In review – a radical leap into darkness
With their golden voices, fertile soundworlds and evocative influences from across Europe, the Sheffield duo’s fifth album is admirably confrontational
By Jude Rogers
An infernal, harrowing scrape begins Rowan and Anna Rheingans’ first album in four years: a bow gnashed against a tambourin à cordes (a traditional Pyrenean strung drum) joined by a distorted and octave-pedalled viola, creating a frightening undertow. The song is Devils, inspired by singer Frankie Armstrong’s 1978 version of the folk ballad The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife, in which she celebrates a woman taken to hell who fights back. The sisters’ voices sound golden against the frantic clamour: “The women are much better than men / Can go to hell and come back again.”
Five albums into a garlanded career, the Sheffield sisters’ work is getting more radical by the release. Inspired by the physicality, energy and intimacy of performing live, Start Close In is produced by contemporary composer and progressive metal artist Adam Pietrykowski, who helps shape its spacious but strangely fertile soundworlds. Its instruments and influences coil from across Europe, from Livet Behöver Inga Droger (Life Needs No Drugs), summoning up memories of a Swedish folk festival that mixes feasting and night-swimming, to the propulsive Si Sabiatz Drolletas, an Occitan-sung bourrée (a French dance) that tells women not to get married as they’ll regret it.
Moments of softer beauty come even when their subjects are heavy: in the marriage of guitar and voice on Over and Over Again, about a need to find medicine to cope with witnessing war and genocide unfold; in Daniel Thorne’s saxophone beautifully bursting into Un Voltigeur, a song about tending a garden sung by polyphonic groups in the Pyrenees that’s actually about finding love and trust. Taking its title from a David Whyte poem about engaging fully with the present and the immediate, this album twitches and gambols with life, very fittingly, from start to finish.
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Album Review: The Rheingans Sisters “Bright Field”
In Bright Field, The Rheingans Sisters have created an album bursting with worldly joys and shot through with intimate sorrow and wisdom.
The Rheingans Sisters are unquestionably the real deal. A resident of Toulouse, Anna is an expert in the traditional music of her adopted homeland; a fact backed up by the first class diploma she recently acquired from the Conservatoire Occitan. Rowan, who has previously collaborated with Nancy Kerr, Gwyneth Glyn and was part of the Songs of Separation project, is a long-time member of firm FRUK favourites Lady Maisery, whose 2016 album Cycle was one of the highlights of that year. Bright Field is their third album as a duo, after Glad Gold Hearts (2013) and Already Home (2015), which led to them winning ‘Best Original Track’ (for Mackerel) at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. It is also their first collection of newly composed music and expands on their impressive blueprint [ . . . ]
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