Claire Vine - We Carve Our Path

Following on from her 2020 EP Tunnels, this is Wales-based Vine’s debut album, a balanced collection of original and traditional material as well drawing on songs from Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, recorded in Bristol and produced by Sid Goldsmith who also contributes alongside Henry Edmunds, Tamsin Elliott and Luke Spurgeon, although the instrumentation is generally mixed so far back as to be almost undiscernible.
Her voice reedy and airy, it’s a traditional tune that opens proceedings, with her vocals overlapping on the wordless intro and continuing eerily in the background of Maid On The Shore and its tale of a wily wench who outwits and robs the sea captain and his crew who would have their way with her. Edmonds on sparse double bass, it’s followed by the metaphorical caution of keeping your maidenhead safe Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, again taken at a slow, almost doomy and atmospheric pace.
Two originals come next, laying out her politics with the unaccompanied Eyes Wide Open (“We continue to poison the air that we breathe/Continue to poison the food that we eat/We spray death on the land, pump it into the seas/We’ve poisoned the very water we drink”) asking those responsible if “coins really count when there’s no food for sale/There’s no grain for the harvest, no water in the well?”, and sounding a call to “take back the land and then replant the trees”. Lost At Sea is also sung a capella, her layered vocals adopting a drone backdrop on a number about refugees (“Once more I read of lives lost to the sea/And it’s not those volunteering for the navy/It’s humans fleeing in belief of freedom and equality”) and a call to “fight for freedom for one and all”, though its mentions of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel does make it dated in the political specifics.
Elliott on minimalist harp, When I Was Young is their arrangement of Seeger’s anti-war song (“What kind of man can force a man who’s married to agree/To take the lives of men with wives bearing guns across the sea”), double bass returning for her own vocally layered Thirty Years From Now where its picture of climate change and environmental destruction is offset by a vision of an eco and community-based future with the reminder “We are one with the plants and the bees the birds and the trees…Our ecosystem is a fragile thing/Which we must nurture to keep our planet thriving/Create a patch of green biodiversity/Lets plant our seeds, make meadows all around”.
Spurgeon featuring on guitar and effects, underage sex and the consequences is the subject of the traditional Fanny Blair, a broadside ballad in which the promiscuous eleven-year-old Fanny (“a perjuring young whore”) falsely accuses the innocent Henry Higgins of sexual assault, he duly being executed.
MacColl is the source for the politically charged Lullaby For The Times which contrasts a child’s innocence with the harsh realities of a parent’s imprisonment, a solid prelude to her own Ceasefire which, Elliott again supplying shimmering harp tinkles, was specifically written about Palestine but is more generally about advocating the plight of refugees from conflicts (“After… letting in your pain/I wish I could take some from you/But what I can do/Is listen to you/And make others listen…and fight for a ceasefire”).
Arranged by Vine and Beth Roberts and with Goldsmith adding vocals, it ends on a bluesy note with her own Song For Les, a touching anniversary tribute to her late father (“My brother’s children they came here today/Though memories of him grow dim/Love leaves a mark that time cannot change/Love binds us all forever”) and the fields where he worked as a sheep farmer during his life, Vine saying “a lot of my family’s farming existence feeds into my politics now, because they’re essentially tenant farmers, not wealthy land-owning farmers. And even though we think about some things differently, my family would also love for certain people to own less land, and for it to be more equally distributed between people" .
The lack of variation in the tone and delivery is problematic, the songs arguably best sampled individually rather than over a single album listening, but there’s no doubt that Vine has a voice that deserves to be heard.