THE HOUSEKEEPING SOCIETY is a project from West Yorkshire-based musicians Ric Neale, Spencer Bayles and Ivan Mack. Their plan for later this year is to release a full album of songs about life in a northern mill town (Saltaire in the 1880s I believe).
This foretaste, a single track called 'The Wheel' is out now, with the album to follow. At first the sheer modernity of the production values is a shock. It's a sophisticated affair. Brass instruments are used in the opening, as you might have predicted, but so are key shifts, flute, glockenspiel, subtle melody, a synth solo and a highly personal-sounding vocal delivery which I had not expected. One of the project's theme that the character of lives in the1880s was not so very different to those prevailing today. If you were growing up in one of those benefactor-graced towns of the New West Yorkshire, unsettling change and the dizzying new industrial promise were as confusing and as contested as todays are now. Then, as now, anachronism, past, present and future were tumbled together.
The song itself is written as if sung by an industrial strength water wheel (as shown in the artwork by the acclaimed Saltaire resident Nick Tankard). Capable of turning millstones or winding thread, the old giant notices a revolution on the way and looks amorously down on (possibly) a young school teacher whose working hours still keep time, as he does, with the sunrise not yet bound into the enforced darkness of the new machine age.
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The song's footnote, (with ukulele) has a tantalising snatch of anthemic melody that (I hope) figures as a full song in a later part of the forthcoming album. It concludes:
"The Revolution came, I fear it passed me by,
My resolute refrain refused to catch its eye
It said 'Boy, are ready? Boy, are you ready?'"
The ambiguities and subtleties are deeply layered. If the album is as densely populated as this single we are going to have plenty to go at when its ready.
www.the housekeepingsociety.com
Buy the single from Bandcamp
Free download of live BBC session
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