The British singer’s impeccable debut captures the joys and sorrows of spring with traces of 1970s folk

May Day — when this album is released — is both a celebration of joy and fertility and a cry for help. The same duality runs through Muggington Lane End, the debut solo album from Lavinia Blackwall, who as the lead singer of Trembling Bells navigated improvisatory psychedelia piled on top of traditional-adjacent melodies; her trained operatic soprano was the centre of the maelstrom unleashed by Alex Neilson, the band’s guiding spirit and lover of what she described as “scratchy-scratchy nonsense”.

The album’s Rocket Cottage-style artwork stakes a kinship with the inward-turned folk of the 1970s, when the first flush of Fairport, Steeleye Span and Pentangle had become unfashionable and their songwriters and alumni ploughed a sometimes lonely furrow. It opens with the piano waltz of “Nothing Is Wasted”. “My eyes are wide open — I can’t see a thing,” she sings. “The hand keeps on pouring the wine down the sink”. Then a fairground Wurlitzer trills like a carillon and the music lurches sideways. “Nothing is ever the way that they paint it in fairy tales.” Flute and violin squirl away like the Beatles’ Mr Kite.

The same uneasy bucolic spirit runs through “Troublemakers”: the “precious memories stay the same”, but the lyrics, set to jangling guitars, tell of a claustrophobic world of curtain-twitching neighbours. “Troublemakers come from out of town”, runs the chorus. “Hold on to Your Love”, another achingly melodic piano ballad, plays similar games with nostalgia. (The album’s title references a district in her native Derbyshire.) There is more than a hint of Sandy Denny — whose songs Blackwall has performed memorably — in the sweeping vocal lines of “Keep Warm”.

Sadness runs throughout the album: on “Ivy Ladder” she laments that “these always were my favourite jeans, they just don’t fit no more”; “All Seems Better” is a plea for daybreak set to eerie electric violin. But there is also the sunburned vernal joy and wordless vocalisation of “Waiting For Tomorrow”, and the outsider balladry of “John’s Gone”, its rumbling keyboard ostinato framing an anti-hero with a “Ford Fiesta, venetian blinds and decking”, is akin to Genesis’s “Harold The Barrel”. There is not a single weak song here, and Marco Rea’s production frames them impeccably.
he same uneasy bucolic spirit runs through “Troublemakers”: the “precious memories stay the same”, but the lyrics, set to jangling guitars, tell of a claustrophobic world of curtain-twitching neighbours. “Troublemakers come from out of town”, runs the chorus. “Hold on to Your Love”, another achingly melodic piano ballad, plays similar games with nostalgia. (The album’s title references a district in her native Derbyshire.) There is more than a hint of Sandy Denny — whose songs Blackwall has performed memorably — in the sweeping vocal lines of “Keep Warm”.

Sadness runs throughout the album: on “Ivy Ladder” she laments that “these always were my favourite jeans, they just don’t fit no more”; “All Seems Better” is a plea for daybreak set to eerie electric violin. But there is also the sunburned vernal joy and wordless vocalisation of “Waiting For Tomorrow”, and the outsider balladry of “John’s Gone”, its rumbling keyboard ostinato framing an anti-hero with a “Ford Fiesta, venetian blinds and decking”, is akin to Genesis’s “Harold The Barrel”. There is not a single weak song here, and Marco Rea’s production frames them impeccably.

David Hongmann – FT 24/4/20

https://www.ft.com/content/344f3e84-82eb-11ea-b555-37a289098206