The Shining Levels have dug deep into the hills to create an earthy and visionary musical accompaniment to Benjamin Myers’ novel The Gallows Pole

Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole kept assaulting me in bookshops. Wandering around, minding my own business, and that beautiful cover would demand my attention. Laid out like a 1960s Penguin Crime paperback, even down to the use of green, except with a noose instead of the Penguin logo, it’s a brilliant interpretation of a modern design classic. The shadowy figure with bright acid-pink coins instead of eyes staring out from the cover sent an arcane charge through me, although I didn’t dare hope that the contents would live up to its strange suggestiveness. A too-quick peruse of the blurb on the back cover and the idea that the story was based on historical accounts convinced me that it might not be for me after all. How wrong I was.

What finally made me buy and read the novel was – in truly backwards fashion – the announcement that a group identifying themselves as The Shining Levels had crafted an album inspired by The Gallows Pole to be released on Outré Disque. My instincts about the book based on the cover might be correct after all, I thought. The pieces coalesced in my mind and I knew I would read the novel before reviewing the album. Benjamin Myers may be writing about coin forgers (clippers) in late 1760s Yorkshire based on historical documentation, but there’s plenty of room for him to evoke the mysticism of the land and its people – and he does not disappoint. There are sickening bursts of violence – sexual and otherwise – and pyschogeographic passages that blossom into the most beautiful writing. Stagmen dance in bedrooms, an Alchemist prophesies murrain and a glorious socialist network sticks it to the man for a spell. Myers describes “the darkening of shortened days bookended by nights that birthed new mythologies from old fears.” As if he’s pulled the words out from the ground beneath his feet.

The Shining Levels’ score is as earthy as Myers’ prose and just as capable of moments of transformative magic. Rather than attempt to create a tediously contemporaneous music, they have clipped folk songs from the ages to forge something living and raw. DW Coggins and Davey J invited a host of collaborators to help realise their vision and the result feels like alchemy. It’s as relevant to now as the novel is – the past of The Gallows Pole is but a cosmic reflection of the present. The music is rich, bold and nuanced. Rugged folk and acid-hewed rock, underpinned by loops, field recordings and processed electronics. Ambient fog occupies the hidden cavities of its sonic landscape. There are songs sung and there is prose spoken (the novel provides some of both). Ballads fashioned out of earth like golems from clay. It’s music suitable for and in collusion with The Wicker Man, Nigel Kneale’s television play Murrain and The Devils.

“Stag Dance” begins like a (more) sinister Bagpuss and continues with a dash of Morricone, before getting down and dirty with guitars not unlike The Drones. It’s the sound of a revisionist Western taking root in the north east of England. The sky clears and the vision fades. A delicate piano and Laura Smith’s vocal takes “Moonless Night” into oddball pop territory, recalling Air’s “All I Need” – if that were dug from the soil and infused with lysergic acid. “Tipping of the Scale” carves out a similar holloway, making its way down into your consciousness. The narrative unfolds across the LP as the songs take flight on their own.

Curiously, “Progress!” starts its journey akin to Angelo Badalamenti’s “Dub Driving” from the Lost Highway soundtrack then flows into something approximating an English reimagining of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Meanwhile, The Shining Levels employ spectral guitars for the man who haunts before he has the means to haunt on “Deighton”. “Men of Straw” is country music carved from the hillside and played by people in animal masks that’ll joyfully burn outsiders. Ink from the pages of the book courses through the musicians’ veins like the darkest of blood.

Benjamin Myers’ novel might be considered Penda’s Fen by way of George RR Martin or else Yorkshire’s answer to The Seventh Seal – all faith, death and visions in a historical setting. The soundtrack by The Shining Levels is a wonder in its own right and it is wonderfully appropriate, meeting the scope and depth of Myers’ words with grit and flame. I imagine The Gallows Pole blasting out of a sound system at an early rave in the countryside – earth-attuned revellers dancing through its past and present days. In other words, the literary folk rock record that the KLF never made. 

outredisque.com

Stewart Gardiner
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