Sarah Louise Henson and Sally Anne Morgan return with another earthy yet exploratory affair as House and Land on Thrill Jockey

Those who worried that Sarah Louise Henson might have been seeking to leave behind her rustic roots with the experimentalist arc followed on her Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars solo LP from earlier this year, should be somewhat comforted to find her returning so soon with Sally Anne Morgan (of Black Twig Pickers) as House and Land. This isn’t to say that the duo’s second joint long-playing outing is a straightforward sisterly-folk affair. As discovered with their eponymous 2017 debut, the twosome often take dense and lateral routes in and out of their psychedelic pastoralist world.

Remoulding American and British traditionalist hand-me-down compositions – learnt from the likes of Dillard Chandler, Shirley Collins, Artus Moser and Almeda Riddle – Across the Field has deep origins and distinctive projections. With Henson and Morgan sharing vocal duties as well as covering a range of familiar and unfamiliar instrumentation bases, the album weaves between arrangements that are both compact and complex.

Despite its bleak narrative of extreme sibling estrangement, murder ballad “Two Sisters” sets the scene serenely with Morgan’s banjo and lead vocals complemented charmingly by Henson’s harmonies and electric guitar lines. The latter fronts the beatifically lovelorn “Rainbow ‘Mid Life’s Willows”, underpinned by her own twelve-string acoustic guitar and topped by Morgan’s fiddle, to sustain the bittersweet mood. Thereafter, the record takes a series of thoughtfully-sequenced twists and turns.

Hence, Morgan leads the way through the brisk bluegrass banjo-propelled dark tale of “The Cursed Soldier”; the two layer their tones within tiers of tin whistle, fiddle, shruti box and glockenspiel for the medievally-tinged “Blacksmith”; the sublime wordless fiddle and electric six-string intertwining of “Carolina Lady” sprawls out like a great lost Dave Swarbrick and Richard Thompson collaboration; and the fleeting “Precious Jewels” unpeels with Morgan re-channelling Black Twig Pickers’ erstwhile conjoinings with Steve Gunn. Proceedings end with the evocative almost-ambient “Ca the Yowes”, which meshes recorder, shruti box and banjo around Henson and Morgan’s elegantly-merged voices.

Whilst there are some austere pastures to traverse within Across the Field, its overall homespun warmth ultimately rewards a very worthwhile journey of scholarly ingenuity.

thrilljockey.com

Adrian
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