Folk music is a very misunderstood genre these days. Far from the “Hey nonny nonny” clichés that people associate it with, folk is a vibrant, wide ranging genre that encompasses music from artists as diverse as Devendra Banhart, Super Furry Animals and Boards of Canada to some of Badly Drawn Boy’s work. To that list add Gravenhurst, the alias of Nick Talbot, whose second album Flashlight Seasons is a gloriously spooked collection of sombre folk songs.
Heavily influenced by the music coming out of Bristol in the nineties by drone-folk bands such as Flying Saucer Attack, Talbot upped sticks from the Home Counties and moved there. He joined the band Assembly Communications, who quickly gained a loyal following in and around the city. Assembly collapsed in 2000, following the tragic death of their bass player Luke in a road accident. Suffering from intense depression and inexplicable pains in his arms, Talbot gave up on music. When he returned to the guitar over a year later, it was to embark on his solo project, Gravenhurst.
Initially put out in limited numbers on Talbot’s own Silent Age label, Flashlight Seasons was soon snapped up by the mighty Warp Records and reissued unchanged. The wider exposure afforded by being on a big name label gained Talbot instant acclaim, and a worldwide audience.
Flashlight Seasons has a distinctive, all enveloping atmosphere that snares the listener from the start. Opening track Tunnels sets the scene with pounding drums and some uneasy organ playing. As titles like Fog Round The Figurehead and Bluebeard might suggest, this is a haunted journey into the backwoods of folklore. The album draws on the poetry of the English countryside, but subverts it with dark, menacing lyrics. “You'll find yourself painting your windows so you don't have to look at what's hammering outside your door,” sings Talbot on Fog Round the Figurehead. Elsewhere he is haunted by “The ghosts of autumn murders”. The landscape of Gravenhurst songs isn’t somewhere safe and beautiful, but a wild and savage place, home to killers and dark forces, where the threat of violence is never far behind.
All of which makes Talbot sound like the very cliché of the tormented singer/songwriter, when it’s not really true. This is a very accessible and inviting record and Talbot’s voice is sweet and light. Many of the songs on here are musically upbeat, even if the lyrics hint at more sinister subject matter.
The standout track on the album is The Diver. It’s a hauntingly beautiful song with Talbot sounding utterly bereft, alone in an ocean of his own misery. His guitar chimes out ominously while subtle atmospherics weave though the background. “It’s getting darker,” he sings, and for the obsessive narrator of the song, sinking deeper into anguish, you can well believe it.
Since the release of Flashlight Seasons, Gravenhurst have released two further albums, Black Holes in the Sand and this month’s Fires in Distant Buildings. Both of these have pushed Talbot’s music far away from the folk sound of his early records into more expansive rock territories influenced by Talbot’s love of The Smiths and My Bloody Valentine. He has also formed (with Guy Bartell) the deeply odd ‘horror-tronica’ act, Brontt Industries Kapital. They released an album earlier this year, Virtute Et Industria, that is every bit as strange as it sounds.
Flashlight Seasons finds Talbot at his most accessible, juxtaposing beautiful music with dark lyrical imagery. Gravenhurst may sound more like the name of a Swedish death metal band than a folk act, but it’s a suitably gothic one. It conjures up images of Wicker Man style rituals, performed in the moss-ridden remains of some derelict woodland castle. These are ruins you would do well to explore.