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Nick Hart: Nick Hart Sings Ten English Folk Songs review | Jude Rogers's folk album of the month
(Roebuck Records)The East Anglian singer’s humanity and sly humour crackle through these simple, stripped-down traditional songs
Nick Hart is an austere, unfussy traditional singer, but far from a dull one; humanity and sly humour crackle warmly through his work. This was there in the bunch of supermarket roses he clutched on the cover of his 2017 debut (Nick Hart Sings Eight English Folk Songs) and the eggs he cradled on its follow-up (Nick Hart Sings Nine English Folk Songs). Both albums bristled with intense, stripped-down folk songs, with Hart’s everyday East Anglian delivery giving them extra dimensions of feeling.Album three was recorded with similar simplicity – most of it in his back bedroom during lockdowns – but this time around, he drafts in more unusual instruments: bones, spoons, a viola da gamba, even a lyre he made from an old banjo and some table legs, played using a similar technique to that of the krar in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where the strings are unmuted to release sound.
Many songs here reveal his sparse, filmic style. It’s easy to imagine landscapes pouring out of the plucked guitar figures of May Song, a Cambridgeshire carol where a man keeps turning to the Lord “again”, a sense of need underlined by a male chorus joining him. Jack Hall is a compelling gallows confessional, while Hart’s version of love song Lemany carries sweetness, as well the mystery of the protagonist’s past.
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