Of The Cathmawr Yards

VINYL FORMAT. Debut album from Chicago slowburn-folk troupe, led by Janet Bean (Eleventh Dream Day, Freakwater) and Jim Elkington (The Zincs) backed by stalwart Chicago indie-rock vets. Think Fairport Convention, Pentangle and a little Astral Weeks.

The Cathmawr Yards is the name of a fictitious graveyard in Wales and is the setting for the Dylan Thomas short story about zombies, entitled "The Horse's Ha". The lyrics resonate with dark and fantastical themes: Talking woodcuts, walking skeletons, and at least eleven references to the moon, merge together to form an unsettling yet familiar feeling that forces other than our own are at work in the physical world. A diva digs her own grave in "Asleep In A Waterfall" and modern-day witches are offered a friendly warning in the album's opening lullaby, "Plumb": "So hold on to old hands, starting with yours/They're softer than leather and harder than oars/And row your rivers of temperance and toil/If you won't float in water, you're bound for the soil". Elsewhere, mankind is under attack from nature in "The Piss Choir," and "Map Of Stars" celebrates being lost in the wilderness as being set free from all timely constraints, both real and imagined: "Make kindling from clocks and cinders you watch/You have you no place to be/You're ripped at the roots and willed by the winds/A cloud with four limbs of fire". These songs, driven by swooning vocals, finger-picked acoustic guitar,inspired cello playing and an artful rhythm section, reconcile the new and old to form a unified debut that is Of the Cathmawr Yards.