Saul Bailey & Mitch Keely - Atthomis

A fly buzzes lazily past; a flicker of distant birdsong; a resonant Bb drone rises from the depths, and Atthomis is upon us. This extraordinary album is the debut release by two remarkable young folk musicians, Mitch Keely (Moonaroon, The Oakstone Trio) on five-string fiddle and Saul Bailey (Glymjack) on melodeon. Keely has for many years been one of the mainstays of the Oxford session scene; last autumn, Bailey wandered into the Monday night Half Moon English session, and this album is the result.

The evocative title comes from a medieval encyclopaedia’s attempt to define the atom (“Atthomis a litill thinge, as it were, of the grotis in the Sonne beme”), and this is very much an album of little things, fragments, motes in sunbeams. It sits squarely in the long-standing Oxford tradition of deep and loving engagement with John Playford’s English Dancing Master, and almost half the album is made up of gorgeous reworkings of rare and neglected Playford dance-tunes.

Woodicock is a fantastic seventeenth-century slow jig, driven by some superb punchy fiddle work by Keely; A Trip to Kilburn gets a mysterious, sinuous reworking under the title Godwyn’s; and The King of Poland is rebuilt as a brilliant crooked jig (The Wheelwright) which is just crying out for a decent caller to stop you getting your feet in a tangle in the B section.

It’s hard to imagine a reader of Bright Young Folk who wouldn’t fall for The Grey Man / Parson Upon Page, a gloriously heavy and chunky reworking of the Green Man Hornpipe (a storming 3/2 hornpipe from John of the Green) and Parson upon Dorothy (Playford), with Bailey giving it some serious crunch on the bass end. But the undoubted highlight of this terrific album, and the best new tune I’ve heard this year, is Bailey’s spell-binding Queen Oak / King Oak. Queen Oak is a slow air haunted by the same brooding medieval atmosphere that hangs over Nick Hart & Tom Moore’s astonishing 2023 album The Colour of Amber; this gradually builds into a sublimely joyful dance-tune, the mighty King Oak, which frankly you ought to introduce to your local session this weekend (everyone will thank you for it).

To judge from this storming and massively confident debut, the English folk tradition is in very safe hands indeed.