This sparkling gem of an album is a cycle of songs about the geography and history of a stubborn corner of West Yorkshire.
Saltaire, Shipley, Hawksworth, Baildon Moor, Hebden Bridge, Holmfirth ... place names like these carry their own poetic weight, sound their own music and impress their own mood. Such towns are the sorts of places in a wild northern England where industrial production first emerged and then, reluctantly and redundantly clung on. They were known first as a wilderness of hills, later for boom times of energy, mills and profit and now for dour resilience. They have become such a richly sullen muse that cliché and nostalgia have never been completely routed.
THE HOUSEKEEPING SOCIETY, wise natives that they are, have avoided the easy options and trudged straight past them to things more subtle and challenging. On balance the song cycle is a tragedy, with human spirit yielding to weakness and indecision. It regrets the triumphant mistakes of a proud past, in danger of recurring with our own fresh turns at the wheel. The idea is embedded in two linking pieces - snatches of the Beatles-conscious "Revolution Part II" and "Revolution Part I" (in that admirable order).
The album's themes are change, science, enquiry, creativity, romance, failed revolution, fantasy, lost opportunity - contemporary themes still shaped by the hills and chastened by the climate. I'm tempted to call it folk music with an indie heart. Vernacular is, for once, just the word. Locally available materials are used as required by craft-based musicians to create durable and handsome pieces that will last. Sampled sound, strings and brass, guitars, ukuleles, drums and percussion, synths and voices – whatever comes to hand and whatever works. Ostentation is out, pride of workmanship is in. Band members and guests (expert proficiency taken for granted) are all welcome.
This approach is established immediately. The sounds of windswept hills and mysterious old machines lead us in to the perkily stressed-out inventor song that switches comfortably between 4/4 and 5/4 as progress threatens, unsuccesssfully, to trample imagination.
Each song adopts a fresh perspective or voice. Love and growing up, making a living, and surviving in a small community are carefully observed. At the centre, for me at any rate, are those two invocations of the demands of revolution. Revolution can be made, revolution must be joined, Revolution is the way to power – for water mills as well as for political movements. The ambiguous personal reaction, sung on a tingling threshold of euphoria that REFUSES to burst out in full Springsteen mode is densely and delicately expressed in those two fragments\:
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"The revolution came, / I fear it passed me by / My resolute refrain refused to catch its eye / But it said: "Boy are you ready? / Boy are you ready? / Boy are you ready?" / and I just shrugged and sighed".
And then:
"the revolution came, I heard it on the wind / a voice like pounding rain said / let the work begin / and I thought "boy are you ready ...?""
Poetry of place and individual uncertainty runs through all the songs. The rigid patriarchal authority of Mill, Father and Master are the backdrop for delicate dances of boyhood anxiety, yearning love, and dreamer’s creativity.
Rick Neale, Spencer Bayles and Ivan Mack have produced a genuine masterpiece with this album. It doesn't shout or puff out its chest but it will tempt you in, and then confound every attempt to pin it down to prosaic explanation or analysis. Within the poetry of the songs we are treated to part of another poem, "The Mill" by Dinah Maria Craik, read by Iain Bloomfield. Around the physical CD is an original drawing by local artist Nick Tankard – every bit as sensitive and ambiguous as the songs.
Do not let this vernacular gem go dusty in critical acclaim or minority circles. It's sturdy, handsome and well fit for daily use at home by all ordinary and many extraordinary folk. Go and find it on the web:
http://www.thehousekeepingsociety.com
http://thehousekeepingsociety.bandcamp.com/album/this-way-to-power
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