Album: Eliza McCarthy

Anglicana, Topic

Once, major labels nurtured artists over several years and a series of albums, both parties working together to build an audience. Not these days: if your spaghetti doesn't stick immediately to the wall, you're out of there – a short-sighted strategy that would afford an artist such as Elton John, were he to start out today, no chance to develop beyond Empty Sky. So, having failed to meet Warners' over-optimistic expectations for her singer-songwriter album Angels & Cigarettes, Eliza Carthy is back at folkie indie Topic Records for this splendid set of songs drawn from the English folk tradition, a heritage too often overlooked at the side of the more thriving Celtic folk tradition. "Worcester City" and "In London So Fair" reflect the regional particularity of a time when towns were weeks, rather than hours, apart, while jaunty instrumentals like "No Man's Jig" and "Three Jolly Sheepskins" derive from the North Yorkshire longsword dance tradition. The settings mostly involve Carthy's fiddle joined by melodeon or concertina drones, though she's not averse to opening up the material with more expansive arrangements, such as horns in a jazzy version of "Willow Tree". The language is equally evocative, sometimes starkly so: who'd want to be the wastrel regretting his spendthrift ways in "Limbo" with lines such as, "Oh, now I am ready to gnaw my own nails/ To drink the cold water of limbo"?