Will Finn & Rosie Calvert - Fallow Alchemy

Recorded over a period of years and described as a concept album about the radical and transformative power of rest and stillness, Fallow Alchemy is Newcastle duo Will Finn & Rosie Calvert’s third album.With Rosie and Will both on vocals, the former playing steel pan and the latter piano and ukulele, they’re joined by Pete Ord on guitar, drummer Adam Stapleford, Bertie Armstrong on banjo with Nicola Beazley contributing fiddle.

Many of the songs highlight the connection between humankind and the natural world, generally diving deep into the traditional cannon. That said, they get the ball rolling with a sparkling cover of Loudon Wainwright III’s Swimming Song, initially just voice and uke before drums and steel pan dive in too.

From here on in, they mostly plough traditional furrows, first up being an unaccompanied rendition of Daddy Fox, a centuries-old staple of the BBC’s Children’s Favourites back in the day, kiddies of course revelling in descriptions of a goose and ducks being hauled off “the legs all a-dangleing down-o”, to have their bones picked clean. From foxes they move to dogs with their percussion and banjo slow stomp take on Blue, a 19th century song from the Mississippi Valley paying tribute to a faithful hunting hound that’s now gone to doggy heaven.

Things take an avian turn with a near seven-minute duetted, pizzicato arrangement of Leatherwing Bat, another American folk song, collected by Francis Child in the late 19th century. Yes, I know a bat’s a mammal but the different variants (recorded by the likes of Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and Peter, Paul and Mary) involve a variety of birds (here including robin, blackbird. owl and sapsucker), and the song itself, a tale of fickle courting as it so happens was likely derived from an old English song about three ravens.

Not traditional as such, The Bee-Boy’s Song is an a capella setting of the Rudyard Kipling poem from Puck of Pook’s Hill by way of Peter Bellamy and relates different elements of bee lore, such as how “A maiden in her glory upon her wedding day/Must tell her bees her story or else they’ll pine away” and if you don’t tell them your news then they won’t produce honey “for if you don’t deceive your bees, your bees will not deceive you”.

Again unaccompanied, and robustly sung, that’s followed by a song that’s very familiar part of the traditional repertoire, The Trooper And The Maid, sometimes known as The Bold Dragoon, which tells an equally familiar tale of a soldier seducing a virginal maid, promising to wed and then doing a runner.

It’s back to the flora and fauna for Squirrel Is A Pretty Thing which, sharing the theme of appearances and deception in the relationship between nature and agriculture, is given a sparse, lurching arrangement with underlying drone with piano, fiddle and haunted, hollow vocals.

A sprightly lolloping strum with pan, fiddle and uke carries along The Herring Song, a popular drinking song around Northumbria, its nonsense lyrics about the fish’s various body parts and “Sing aber o vane, sing aber o linn” refrain having a touch of the children’s playground.

Another plucked swayalong number, The Hornet And The Beetle is again a poem, this a setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams from Charles Gardiner’s 1960 article The Old Cotswold Dialect: Birds, Beasts and Flowers, published, a pointed amusing fable about the British legal system as the two insects quarrel over possession of a tree only to both be gobbled up by a passing woodpecker who offers to adjudicate, the moral being that lawyers will “take your coat and carcass too/And make a meal right out of you”.

Deviating from traditional sources, duetted a capella, Bamfield’s John Vanden is a contemporary shanty written by Chris Frye of The Bills to honour his great uncle, a coastal fisherman who lived and worked in Bamfield, British Columbia, trawling and acting as coastguard, wed to the Pacific but never a woman, before eventually moving to Vancouver at the age of 88, passing away eight years later.

They continue in similar salty vein with Will taking lead on their cover of John Connolly and Pete Sumner’s shanty The Trawling Trade which, from their album celebrating the fishing industry of the North East, is pretty much about what it says on the label.

Rosie guides the album into its final stretch with the unaccompanied layered vocal drone of Appalachian traditional Mariah’s Gone, a lament about a departed lover which first appeared in Jean Richie’s 1955 book Singing Family of the Cumberlands written about her parents and their 14 children in Kentucky. The second longest track and the sole instrumental, anchored by piano and steel pan, Weeds Waltz / Oranges In Bloom / Beattie’s Waltz combines three tunes, the stately almost courtly madrigal opener leading into a Cotswold Morris dance tune from Sherborne in Gloucestershire and closing with a tune by Finn seemingly based around Lake Dore Waltz written in the 1950s by Ottawa’s Mac Beattie.

It ends, somewhat removed from its avowed concept, with Peggy Seeger’s Lady, What Do You Do All Day? a wry complaint about the hardship and lack of recognition that accompanies being a housewife and mother, Will posing the a capella opening title question sung by Ewan MacColl on the original before, backed by uke, Rosie lays out everything she has to deal with, from a bedwetter kid to a cranky mother-in-law, forced to go out to work to make ends meet, having to nanny her boss, but at least getting paid for it.

It’s been a long time in the making, but as, per the title, it really does work its transformative magic.