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Even if your only interest in folk music comes from listening to Led Zeppelin after a large jazz fag, there is such a self-evident connection between heavy music’s psychedelic urges and the primitive, ageless elegance of folk rock pioneers like Pentangle and Fairport Convention that Galley Beggar’s stripped-down explorations feel like an entirely natural fit for the Rise Above roster.
Silence And Tears is by no means as quirky or eccentric as the Circulus records that the label put out a few years back, but it shares the same sense of lysergic wonder and woozy warmth.
Relocated to a more fuzz-driven context, something as beautifully languid and restrained as the nine-minute Pay My Body Home could easily have escaped from a Witchcraft or Seremonia record, and it is from that same well of delicately occult-tinged sonic curiosity that Galley Beggar seem to be drawing their inspiration.
And while there is a sense that songs like Silence And Tears and Jack Orion represent misty-eyed nostalgia for a time before technology consumed our souls, the sheer conviction on display throughout this magical record makes it far more than some retro curio./o:p
