Rachael McShane & The Cartographers - Uncharted

The first release since their 2018 debut from the North East trio of Bellowhead fiddler and cellist McShane, guitarist Ian Stephenson and melodeon player Julian Sutton sees them joined by Andy May on occasional piano with backing vocals by Janice Burns, Benji Kirkpatrick, Sam Sweeney, Amy Thatcher and Jonathan Proud for a collection of largely traditional tunes and songs that makes you release how missed they’ve been in their absence.

It fires up its fine fettle with Get Up Jack, a melodeon-wheezing arrangement of a traditional number sometimes known as The Jolly Roving Tar culled, with some lyrical rejigging (the girls are no longer plump and round), from Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America about libidinous sailors getting older and how you’re only welcome at the grog shop as long as there’s money in your pocket.

Sharing similar components, taken at a rousing strum with fiddle powering the batteries, Lady And The Sailor is another from the canon with a McShane musical arrangement, a broadside ballad that, while it covers familiar tropes, is sufficiently obscure not to appear in any searches. That’s not something that can be said of the much-covered The Blacksmith, telling of a woman betrayed by her lover, the fingerpicked guitar and cello treatment here taken from one of the several melody variants collected by Vaughan Williams

The first of the originals, Dusty Jigs is a lively instrumental that comprises McShane’s Dancing On A Holly Leaf (which sounds a bit painful) dating from her student days in Newcastle and two by Sutton, High Spirits And Short Attention Spans for his daughter Maria and the scampering Percy’s Revenge apparently dedicated to Kathryn Tickell’s cat.

The sole cover is Ed Pickford’s The Workers’ Song which, showcasing Sutton’s melodeon drone and McShane’s soaring and tremulous vocals, was sourced from Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth and put together to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Topic Records, the line about how the workers are “always the last when the cream is shared out” as relevant now as it was in 1981.

Returning to traditional pastures, another melodeon-wheezer, Young Roger Esquire is a lighthearted ditty about the eponymous miller insisting he won’t marry the farmer’s daughter unless he throws in the grey mare too, the old man rightly telling him to hoof it. That’s followed by another of equine persuasion, Bonny George Campbell, a mournful fiddle drone and fingerpicked guitar lament about a horse who returns home from battle without its rider, leaving his bride a widow.

With McShane again providing the arrangement, despite the jaunty tune Banks Of Sweet Dundee is another downbeat tale, this about an orphan whose uncle wants to marry her off to a wealthy squire in whom she has no interest, ending up with her killing them both.

May on piano, the instrumental Shivering Stone pulls together a mournful fiddle take on Alistair Anderson’s tune inspired by the Cheviot Hills that border England and Scotland, alongside the much livelier Jungle of Cucumbers inspired by Sutton having feelings of vegetable inadequacy at a country fair and, before it winds the pace back down McShane’s Bingo in Bognor about a night they found themselves playing just that.

Uncharted ends with one last traditional outing, marrying McShane’s arrangement of the slow shanty swaying Windy Old Weather with two sea-themed tunes, Gilles Le Bigot’s Rachael Les Pêcheurs and John Whelan’s Trip to Skye taking it out with the tide, a fine finale for an album that firmly puts them back on the trad folk map.