There's something unique and unrepeatable about Snowgoose's third album. Anna Sheard and Jim McCulloch (ex Bmx Bandits and The Soup Dragons), after the caressing 2012 debut “Harmony Sping” and the excellent 2020 return to the scene entitled “The Making Of You”, face the acid test with an album with rich premises.
For “Descendant” Anna and Jim involved guitarist Raymond McGinley (Teenage Fanclub), keyboardist Chris Geddes (Belle and Sebastian), bassist Stevie Jones (Arab Strap), pedal steel wizard Tim Davidson (Tracyanne & Danny), and two drummers, namely Stuart Kidd (The Wellgreen, BMX Bandits) and Adam Stearns (Trembling Bells). The album also establishes a synergy between Ba Da Bing and Violette, the two labels that deal with production/distribution.
Recorded live in the studio in Glasgow, “Descendant” is only at first glance a folk-pop album (“Better Listen”). Anna and Jim immediately bring to bear references to the Fairport Convention (“Salix”) and rather harsh and typically sixties (“The Fall”); everything is functional to the melancholy lyrics where the ephemeral tries to defeat the depth of feelings. In this fresco naive the light-hearted verseless chorus of “Fugue State” and the moving restlessness of “Belwidered Dance” represent the yin and it yang of a record where joy and pain, life and death, dialogue with austere tones and intrinsic beauty.
The jazz-folk vibrations of the splendid “Down The Line” embellished by Chris Geddes' touch on the keyboards and the poignant fragility of the ballad for piano, voice and steel guitar of “Wings Of Glory” add the right dose of drama and depth, quality from which are not immune both the mystical and swaying folk-ballad à la Trembling Bells “Good Medicine” and the elegant chamber-folk of title track. But in the emotional track of “Descendant” there is space for a multiplicity of musical nuances that hold reality and transcendence together (“Sorrow”), giving Snowgoose's music a rather rare expressive universality.
For Anna Sheard and Jim McCulloch, Snowgoose's third album is a more ambitious and visceral declaration of intent, a record that elevates the duo's status from a folk-pop formation to heirs of a more noble tradition that smells of folk, jazz and psychedelia .
11/19/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
