You Tell Me
You Tell Me
Memphis Industries
SOMEONE had surely heard an advance copy of the new collaboration between Peter Brewis of Field Music and Sarah Hayes of Admiral Fallow when their beguilingly-named duo was booked to join Roddy Hart’s Roaming Roots Review celebration of the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ Abbey Road album at Celtic Connections on Sunday January 20.
The penultimate track, an album highlight entitled Starting Point, owes so much to the blissful second side sequence of the last recordings the Fab Four made together that its title is surely a reference to precisely those origins. It then segues into the closer, Kabuki, in similar same style.
You Tell Me wear their influences proudly. The pair met at a concert celebrating the work of Kate Bush, and the complexity of that woman’s work underlies some of the tracks here. Brewis and his brother have their own individual way with “math-rock” in Field Music, and that is never far away, particularly in some of the rhythms, but Hayes brings a folk sensibility to the table in her songwriting so that echoes of Fairport Convention with Sandy Danny and the folk/jazz of Pentangle with Jacqui McShee are also apparent.
All of the songs are relatively brief, and it is not hard to spot with which of the collaborators most began, but they spark off one another beautifully, and embrace the widest range of instrumental possibilities in the studio. It will be interesting to hear how memorable numbers like Get Out Of The Room, Springburn, and Invisible Ink shape up at their own Celtic Connections gig in the CCA on February 2.
Keith Bruce
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