Spiro
Welcome Joy Welcome Sorrow (Real World, 2015)
Sometimes there is just no practical description for some of the recordings that cross my desk. Sometimes I just have to go with images that pop into mind, so the only way I can describe the group Spiro’s latest Welcome Joy Welcome Sorrow, out on the Real World label, is that it’s a bit like trying to keep an eye on a ripple of water in a flowing brook or perhaps laying back outside on a breezy day and enjoying the play of light behind closed eyes.
While not exactly a folk band or a string quartet, Spiro straddles the line between folk and classical. Imagine Philip Glass hopped up on English folk. Fashioned out the prodigious talents of violinist and violist Jane Harbour, mandolinist Alex Bann, piano accordionist and pianist Jason Sparkes and acoustic guitarist and cellist Jon Hunt, Spiro has dazzled fans with previous recordings Pole Star, Lightbox and Kaleidophonica and now continues wowing fans with their worked over, wrung out and hopped up brand of traditional English tunes like “Over the Hills and Far Away,” “Tulloch Goram” and “John of the Green.
Ms. Harbour explains, “We’re like a string quartet, but the most driving and exciting string quartet you could imagine.”
Deliciously dense and intricately folksy-ish, Welcome Joy Welcome Sorrow leaps headlong into opening track “I Am the Blaze on Every Hill.” Marked by repeating lines against swirling melodies, the music of Welcome Joy Welcome Sorrow possesses a cinematic feel of passing scenery. “Blyth High Light” has a slightly more English folk feel against the whirlwind feel of “Burning Bridge.”
Other goodies include the lush “And All Through the Winter He Hid Himself Away,” “Will You Go Walk the Woods So Wild,” the delicately worked “Orrey” and “Marineville.” “Thought Fox” and the plaintively sorrowful “The Still Point of the Turning World” are two more standout tracks on this rich recording where folksy joy and sorrow meets artful mastery.
Welcome Joy Welcome Sorrow is as almost difficult to categorize as it is to describe. It is musically where wild and free collide with strict structure; it is where the individual meets up with the machine.
Ms. Harbour adds, “We are like watch-makers who have made an intricate machine. You just wind it up and let it go.”
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
