Cooper Robson (vocals); Stanley Elvis Woodward/King David
Ike-Elechi/Ferg Kilsby (vocals) (track 9); Stanley Elvis Woodward (bass
guitar/synths); King David Ike-Elechi (drums/percussion); Ferg Kilsby (Trumpet,
flugelhorn); Sandro Shargarodsky (piano, keyboards, synthesiser); George
Johnson (tenor saxophone); Otto Kampa (alto saxophone); Tom Ford (guitar);
Geordie Greep (guitar) (tracks 4 and 7); Josh Mitchell-Rayner (piano) (track
1); Viviane Ghiglino (flute) (track 1); Lucy Rowan (alto flute) (track 1);
Frank Barr (clarinet) (track 1); Sebastian Barley (french horn) (track 1);
Tobias Amadio (trumpet) (track 1); Bertie Beaman (trombone) (track 1); Dillon
Pinder (trombone) (track 9); Enya Barber (violin); Congling Wu (violin);
Natalia Solis Paredes (viola); Morgan Key (cello)
There’s a wonderful Northern defiance that runs through much of this
album like a steel rod. It’s two fingers up to the South and advice to tell
them that they can stick their ingrained entitlement and belief in their
superiority where the sun don’t shine. (Ironic suggestion, I know, in the
middle of a heatwave).
It ranges from big boots on the ground, declaimed poetry, through rapid-fire punk rock to jazz-rock, some blues-soul and an occasional sweeping elegance that all holds together because these are all constituent parts of their portrait of the North. Heresy, I know, but it reminds me of Ezra Collective in the way that Knats have incorporated their roots into the music, meanwhile, the imagery in Cooper Robson’s poems add enormous strength to anchoring the group into the local soil.
Opener, 7 Bridges To Burn is
one of Robson’s poems over bold, beautifully arranged, sweeping strings and
warm brass and woodwinds. Images from local geography and 200 years of social
and political history and of sporting life emerge from the gentle music. The
tight focus on one broken character moves to the hopes and dreams of a new generation
with “7 bridges to burn” which in
turn soars over a historical sweep
from “Romans… to Roundheads to Reivers,…Ship
workers to Shearer…Pit ponies turned coal dolies” with equal contempt for
Thatcher and Ashley. It’s all of Kynren in 40 lines and is quite an
achievement.
Gainsborough Grove/Wor Jackie follows. The Grove in question sounds posher than it is,
as it’s up Arthur’s Hill in Fenham. Brass fired prog that flows into pure soul
and back out again via a rich voiced tenor and into a spiralling bass solo with
simple themes that rise above the proggy breakdown. Wor Jackie is a paean to those men physically broken by heavy
industry and the pits with ferocious screams and wailing souls; it’s violent
and dramatic. Lyrically, it’s a second cousin to Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding from the time of the
Falklands War. Messy-In is more
chilled and reflective to open with a complex bassline decorated with electric
piano and a lovely trumpet solo before the pure 70s soulful jazz funk of Azure Blues; all grooves with a furious,
expansive bass solo, insistent drums, pulsing piano and it all seems to hang
off a single chiming cowbell. It’s one for white suits on the Tuxedo Princess
and is to be played loud. It closes with a gentle, reflective, early dawn,
mellow, home stretch.
Bigg Market Scrappa is all angles and punches in the music to
capture the lyrical sketch of the aforementioned Scrappa who ends with his “Head
spinning like the donner in the window pane.” Carpet Doctor opens as a
story blues, its subtlety undermined by a driving pulsing bass line before it
explodes into something bolder. The Doctor
of the title is another ex-prisoner trying to make his way in the world in
the face of general mistrust. He’s carried along by music that is equal parts
jazz and splenetic punk rock fury that reminded me of The Ruts, more than any
others, with a scything guitar struggling to rise above the melee. There is
defiance in the lyric as the man struggles his way through, but he is, he
states “not the caterpillar, I am the
butterfly” though the sheer heft of the music does serve to undermine the
delicacy of the butterfly metaphor as a furious musical pile on forces the
voice forward just to be heard. Never
Gonna Be A Boxer is a nice piece of solid rolling jazz funk with soaring
brass, some 70s squelching synth and a probing bass, all sharp turns and minor
excursions around the main theme, a groove that really digs in.
There is melancholy aplenty in closing lament, Farewell Johnny Miner, which features Kilsby’s excellent trumpet
playing as part of a rich, rounded, full voiced arrangement. For those of us
who are old enough, it’s another reminder of the Miners’ Strike of the mid 80s
and the opportunity to consider whether to get our hopes up as the King of The
North waits to be crowned. I suspect that many of us are thinking NOT.
The question has been raised of whether this very North East centric
music will travel and I hope that it will. The voice and the words are stridently
defiant but far from incomprehensible and, it’s just a small revenge for having
to put up with Chas & Dave in the 70s. More importantly, it’s a musically
and lyrically powerful album, made with passion and commitment, defiantly and,
more importantly, proudly, northern.
Dave Sayer
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