The Water Chorus - Scorn

A London-based four piece comprising Sophie Grenfell, guitarist and bouzouki player Jack Seville, Ali Lawrenson on fiddle, banjo and concertina and Caitlin Chalmers on shruti, their debut studio EP tackles four traditional numbers, each featuring a different member of the band taking lead.

Grenfell’s first up with Soldiers Three, a 17th century drinking song evoking the carousing that segues into an urgent fiddle-driven flurry through The Cobbler’s Hornpipe and ends with them harmonising a fragment of the Shaker hymn The Good Old Way.

Moving on 100 years, Lawrenson on lead with banjo, bouzouki and a lively fiddle break, the rousing The Maid and the Palmer, sometimes known as The Well Below The Valley, is a medieval murder ballad, the latter (a holy man) accusing the former of killing her nine children and laying down 21 years of punishment, among them “seven to run as an ape through hell”.

Saville stepping up, approached as a drone with just guitar, fiddle and shruti, The Rocks of Bawn is an early 18th century Irish lament about the futility and toll of trying to farm inhospitable land to the extent that even life in the army seems preferable. The line “It’s true that I must ramble from my dear old Irish home” possibly alludes to the displacement of farmers from their traditional lands during the reign of Cromwell. Quite where Bawn may be is anyone’s guess.

Chalmers brings it to a close, her broad Glaswegian brogue making a meal of the dialect in the banjo accompanied banger Willie’s Wife, telling of Willie Wastle, a weaver from Tweed, whose one-eyed, bewhiskered, hunchback wife “was dour and din” to the extent the narrator declares “I wad na gie a penny/I wad na gie a pound/I wad na gie a shilling/Ye cannae wear me doon/I wad na gie a tuppence/I wad na trade ma hound./Such a wife as Willie had, I wad na gie a button for her”. The lyrics even throws in a self-deprecating people in glass houses reference to old Rabbie Burns himself (“he wipes his nose wi a cushion;/His giant fists like muddy neeps/His face defyles the Logan Water”).

It’s only a brief taste of what they have to offer and I look forward to a full album down the line with perhaps them exploring duets or three and four part harmonies too.