From The Ground - From The Ground

For centuries, folksong has helped both listeners and performers deal with loss and grief. Over the past decade, many of the finest trad musicians have been trying to find a language in which to express the pain and helplessness that so many of us feel at the impact of environmental breakdown - species loss, mass human displacements, irreversible (and avoidable) ecocide. In their new musical project, From the Ground, Laura-Beth Salter (Kinnaris Quintet, The Shee) and Ali Hutton (Treacherous Orchestra, Old Blind Dogs, Ross & Ali) have crafted a rich, moving, and deeply personal response to the climate crisis.

Salter and Hutton are a match made in heaven (or in Glasgow, which amounts to the same thing). They’ve grown hugely as a duo since their 2019 EP, Beginnings: just compare the stark, intimate version of Hutton’s The Beautiful Cold on Beginnings with the vast, echoing widescreen take here. The core of their sound is the interplay between Salter’s crystalline mandolin and Hutton’s guitar, pipes and whistle, perhaps most beautifully on display here in the final tune-set, Breathe, where Salter’s delicate mandolin stylings on Room to Breathe make a perfect dance-partner for Hutton’s triumphant pipe-tune Life Afloat. But Hutton’s synth and sample-heavy arrangements now have a bleak cinematic grandeur, particularly on monumental pipe-led opener The 11th Hour and the epic Aquila. Another highlight is the rolling tune-set Boreal, a showpiece for Hutton’s low whistle, which builds to a punchy 7/8 dance-tune called Taiga.

Ultimately, though, the keynote is optimism. Salter’s stunning title song imagines a tree watching in helpless consciousness as the fires rage around it (“The silent sky so still/There’s no birdsong to be heard here”), beginning in the darkest of keys (Bb minor), before a dramatic major lift for the more upbeat chorus (“There’s still time/To turn this around”). But the centrepiece of this superb album is the nine-and-a-half-minute Broken Shores, an exquisite Hutton air which builds to a lovely Salter mandolin slip-jig (played in unison with Patsy Reid’s fiddle), itself yielding to a gorgeous poem by the Perthshire poet Jim Mackintosh, recited over rippling guitar and the sound of waves crashing on the shore: “Will we taste the purple haze/Will we dance under fragrant pines/Will you come with me tomorrow/To end these mournful times?” It sounds like hope, in more ways than one.