Earth Felt the Wound (Westbrook Records)
Kate Westbrook & The Granite Band
Released July 31, 2020
Jazzwise Top 20 Releases of 2020
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mHtUHDRRiNrkCev-oPn0g9O1mae0wz754
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/39Rs4RjEDr8vzLSTRrBgfS?si=we9HT7LDRmCWn-qnceBFgQ
About:
Hard on the heels of their ‘epic and ground-breaking Granite project, Kate and the Granite Band with producer Jay Auborn are back with a major new album. Recorded in Summer 2019 in the depths of the Devon countryside, mixed and mastered at dBs studios Bristol, Earth Felt the Wound deploys state-of-the-art recording to stunning effect and takes Kate and The Granite Band in a radically new direction.
Earth Felt the Wound – its title a quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost – is an album of extremes, from the intimate to the epic, from the tenderness of the Rossini ballad Once Upon a Time to the rock histrionics of Drowned in the Flood. It opens with with one of Westbrooks’ most lyrical songs The Streams of Lovely Lucienne and closes with the exuberant comedy of Rooster Rabelais. Elsewhere Kate’s lyrics examine the contemporary issues of climate change and threats to the planet. The song at the heart of the album, Storm Petrel takes its title from the tiny seabird that spends its life on the ocean, while beneath its dancing feet sea levels are rising. Kate’s collaboration with Mike began with their jazz cabaret Mama Chicago, which won the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Award in 1978. There has followed a succession of music-theatre pieces, settings of European poetry, operas and original song cycles. Kate’s lyrics are often a response to contemporary social, cultural and environmental issues. A notable example is The Serpent Hit, a Political Fable, recorded in 2013, produced by the late Jon Hiseman. Granite, a composition inspired by her love of Dartmoor and its granite quarries, was recorded in 2018, her first collaboration with Jay Auborn. To perform it she brought together the group of highly individualistic, open-minded and ‘rock solid’ musicians who make up The Granite Band.
Track Listing:
1. The Streams of Lovely Lucienne 05:23
2. Threat of Natural Disaster 03:41
3. Big Baby Hips 04:05
4. Menace De Catastrophe Naturelle 03:59
5. Drowned in the Flood 05:09
6. Weltende Begins 02:40
7. Weltende 02:36
8. Bathing Belles and Fiscal Analysts 04:56
9. Let’s Face the Music 03:46
10. Storm Petrel 07:47
11. Once Upon A Time 05:21
12. Rooster Rabelais 07:03
Personnel:
Kate Westbrook: voice
The Granite Band
Roz Harding: saxophones
Jesse Molins: guitar
Matthew North: guitar
Billie Bottle: bass guitar, voice, piano, organ
Mike Westbrook: piano
Coach York: drums
Recorded and produced at Home Grown Studios (2019) and dBs Pro Studios (2020), by Jay Auborn, except track 11 recorded live November 17, 2018, at Teatro Rossini, Pesaro, by Matthew North
Assistant Recording Engineer: Callm Godfrey
Assistant Mixing Engineers: Vikissim de Viku and Giorgio Cortiana
Painting: Kate Westbrook
Design: Sam Whitney-Morris
Produced by Jay Auborn
Review:
Kate Westbrook returns with the Granite Band that so powerfully debuted with the album of that name. But where Granite was an evocation of the terrifying beauty of Westbrook’s beloved Cornwall, Earth Felt The Wound takes similar themes – of Nature huge, indifferent and mortally wounded by man – and expands them to epic, Miltonesque, scale.
The difference is most obviously pointed up in the treatment of Berlin’s ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’. On Granite, the song closes the album in lyric style, Kate whistling winsome against found birdsong and the echoing of a granite quarry. On Earth Felt the Wound it’s the cry of a wound opening, a defiant yowl against the dying of the light, the last dance on the Titanic.
Not that this world and what we’ve done to it is without redemption, but consolation is buried full fathoms deep and is often a singular affair. Perhaps a Cinderella innocence will save us (a lovely live arrangement of a Rossini theme), perhaps a Rabelaisian lust for life, summed up in ‘Rooster Rabelais’. But while lonesome seabirds skip and dance (Harding’s squalling sax is most apposite on ‘Storm Petrel’), the waters still mass around a drowning world – North keeps it apocalyptic with some Fripp-like chordings – while Coach York’s drums crack hurricanoes.
Producer and engineer Auborn and Godfroy somehow summon, as they did on Granite, a world that is both sonically intimate, catching Westbrook’s every breathy, wracked or rainbow sweet intonation yet also quarry wide in its range of dynamics. The title of course comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein the best tunes notoriously went to the Devil.
Well, Kate Westbrook just gave him some more.
Andy Robson (Jazzwise)
