It's not a popular opinion, not that there is a much of an established consensus around a small band's catalogue, but Seven is for me the greatest of all Wolfstone albums. Typically for one of their 90s records the production isn't as stern or oomphy as it could have been, but it is their most entrancing, which for me is important to consider given how I ever loved Wolfstone to begin with. Sure, they're a Celtic rock band from Inverness, with music from and for the people and those old stories and the infrastructure of what it is to be a folk band, but to me, as with numerous other bands from completely different places, they take me not only to my early childhood but especially to Stowford Farm, Farleigh Hungerford, a few miles up the road from me. Scottish, Irish and English folk music to me is the sound of the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival, which I attended annually, thanks to my parents and some of their friends being permanent fixtures in its fields since 1991. Just as it was inevitable that this blog would cover compilations, so it is with folk music, particularly folk which works as pop. There will be more to come, but there is a lot of folk rock and Celtic fusion that is enormously important to me, and I need to gradually tell that story here.
Not that the 'rock' in Wolfstone was always so pronounced, as initially they were set up around Duncan Chisholm's mastery of the local Scottish Highlands fiddle style, having studied under Donald Riddle, and the band only properly came into being when he met singer Stuart Eaglesham some time on. Their earliest recordings, issued locally around the turn of the 90s as Wolfstone and Wolfstone II (and later re-released without band consent) are all but disowned by the group and are inevitably the work of likeminded musical travellers who have not yet coalesced into that singular force, not least because of their reliance on a chintzy, inexpressive drum machine which they'd soon replace with Jon Henderson. Except I'm typically all for the cheap and cheery and even when they do stabilise into the 'classic' Wolfstone I receive much the same exudation of (com)passion out of their music, and you can clearly sense they'll reach the light at the end of the tunnel from day one much as Runrig did. And so, Unleashed (1991) and The Chase (1992), both for Iona Records, set their glacial stage with their mix of songs and instrumentals, standards and originals. By the time of 1994's Year of the Dog, their first on prestigious American Celtic label Green Linnet, they were a reliable part of the international folk circuit.
What Wolfstone can be seen to be doing was, in essence, a relocated continuation of the Big Music of Big Country, Simple Minds and others in central Scotland. By being removed geographically they also were socio-culturally; the punk that had informed those bands vanished, the ancient space ever vaster. Not only was the ignored world Stuart, Duncan, Ivan and the others lived in far smaller but so were their facilities, and it shows. The 'cheapness' in Wolfstone's bigness is key to their central magic; they really use their small-time production and parpy synths to their most logical zenith, not to transcend their land but to reanimate the pastoral music and stories they grew up on. Not 'bombastic', never; no matter how 1987 'stadium' their iconographic guitars, the music is still one of quietness, for small spaces dreaming big. This especially shows when, rather than max out, they emphasise the textural and intimate, as with the languid Ness interface of "The £10 Float" (or rather the first half of it, which sets up the valedictory second section), the geometric horizon of "Hard Heart" or the hollow, amorphous 'rock' of "Here Is Where the Heart Is" (mix it differently and you may have 'arena' or 'folk club' dub).
By remaining so small, Wolfstone of course faced no chance of being 'misunderstood'. 1996's The Half Tail, their best and most dynamic album up to this point, was also their final with lead vocalist Ivan Drever before he departed. What followed were protracted financial struggles that virtually killed the band off. Green Linnet still held them contractually accountable and this led to regrettable decisions like issuing Ivan and bassist Wayne Mackenzie's side-project This Strange Place as a Wolfstone record, despite being as un-Chisholm as, say, Connections & Disconnections was un-Clinton. The luridly packaged album (perhaps the most professional of any 'Wolfstone' project yet) was seen as a minimalist, reductive retreat into mellowness (although "The Wild Monkey Dance" would later be used as a live intro to "Clueless") and threw a band who were re-beginning anew, sans Ivan (with Stuart Eaglesham, who hitherto sang lead on some songs, sometimes as counterpoint to Ivan, taking over wholesale) completely off. Their reformation was again at Green Linnet's doing (the reason there are two versions of Lúnasa's Redwood is them fucking around with people's livelihoods too). But the new Wolfstone recorded the required Seven not just as contractual obligation but something to put their heart and soul into, a band who had to prove themselves, who didn't want the whole mess of 1996-98 to begin with and would actually love to get back on the road.
Compared to Ivan Drever, whose gravelly voice made him sound like the weight of his whole life was pent up inside everything he sang, Stuart is much more fey, more indie even. This was a necessary dynamic contrast on earlier albums, two different singers anchoring each other, bound by upbringing and experience. But now that Stuart is carrying lead vocals alone he ends up pushing the band the furthest away from rawk tropes that they'd ever get. That the whole group conjure up a more reflective, rootsier sound was perhaps them naturally following his lead, even when he isn't singing. On the first of the record's songs, album highlight "Brave Boys", they strip back to the point of it it barely counting as rock 'n' reel, instead prioritising Andy Simmers' flowing piano over any Celtic instruments (the fiddles are left to purr alongside bassy crashes in the semi-formless ambient intro, redolent perhaps of Jon Hassell). A modern McLean anti-war song, or that's at least how it seems, Stuart – weaving in cautions from Passchendaele and "the fields of France" – advises no shame felt by those brave boys who wish to "run away" ("just be your father's son"), and uses similar language even to Stump's "Our Fathers". The squiggly Hammond shapes in the final minutes, by turns melodic and freeform, are a curious choice of exit as they are treated with a serenity that stops them sounding like 60s/70s rock and instead a vague hum into more thoughtful times, perhaps.
Singing there, Stuart comes over like a Scottish Ian Broudie (a compliment!), yet a change of context on "Wild and the Free" makes him sound more like Glenn Tilbrook, which may be why the song proper resembles 1990s Squeeze (particularly their reposing from Some Fantastic Place and beyond) crossed with hints of the Waterboys' rustic mysticism, likewise on "Crowfeathers", which after its Inverness-vast prologue typically begins to transfigure the Big Music of Sparkle in the Rain into something more intimate for a smaller community, but anew. Sung from the perspective of adrift corbies a la "The Three Ravens", there is mindful imagery all over ("a feast of MacAdam's dead") but the song is one of contented free rein (whereas "Wild and the Free" is determinately reflective, just like "Tall Ships" was). The slightly soupy "Black Dog" is relatively slight and probably the closest thing to a weak link, but the Deacon Blue-evoking (a compliment!) rhythmic jolt is blatantly joyful, ergo hard to deny. What all of the songs convey is some sense of communal buckling up and helping each other through, and while I won't pretend to know anything much about Highland history this is still an unsurprising conclusion.
As always, the songs in all their urgency are balanced by the instrumentals, which reprioritise the order of personnel so that, with one exception, the pipes, fiddles and whistles accentuate and as jigs, reels and airs plot out destinations that songs alone do not. Although "Psycho Woman" (big nostalgia!) opens the album with a big Main Tent grin, a reliably stem-winding way of alerting us to their return (it is undeniably rollicking, even though that is not a word anyone actually uses in real life), the others are introspective and bewitching, loaded with implications and an overwhelming sense of place. "Maggie's" is to this album what "Clueless" was to The Half Tail, frantically searching for and then finding mirthful epiphany (providing, after "Psycho Woman", the album's second most obvious crowdpleaser), while "Jen's Tune" is a gorgeous little ruminative arrangement, one of those pieces who sound alone is instantly evocative of a time and place for me (of which more anon) from even before I ever really listened to it. It shares its dreamy, if slightly doleful tone with the twilight rave-up "Quinie Fae Rhynie", which trickles easily on pellucid keyboard drones, mist rolling down the Torridon mountains, and is rhythmically a near mirror image of "Black Dog", except this one requires its speed and heavy beat to shake its agitation off.
"Fingal's Cave", a traditional lament that is not to be mistaken for Mendelssohn's overture, is named for the arresting formation in the Inner Hebrides. In Wolfstone's hands there is a shuffling beat that in another context might be trip hop or something quite Soul II Soul but here is part of a morose cycle at sunset. A nautical Ian Crichton Smith poem is recited by a low, unco voice almost four minutes in but, buried in the mix and distorted by distended delay, it is near-impossible to grasp, a voice lost to the sea breeze (and a precedent for what Peatbog Faeries discovered vocals could be used to achieve in a number of years). The album ultimately ends on this curious, yet expansive note, like some slight trepidation about where Wolfstone may be headed that was to be ridded the moment they stood on stage again.
But the best instrumentals form the album's centre and are arrestingly crestfallen like few other music is to me. I know nothing of who keyboardist/pianist Andy Simmers was, and this was his only studio album with Wolfstone. Having joined the reformed group in 1998, he hanged himself during the tour that followed Seven in 2000, the band's second suicide after piper Roddy McCourt several years prior. But on Seven he plays a solo piano piece, "John Simmers", named for I assume a relative, but we don't know who he or what the story could be, and the enigmatic nature of Andy and this instrumental only heightens its prematurely mournful nature, two minutes of a maroon flame to stop all time. And it does to me what "The Eternal" or "Decades" off Closer do (maybe not to you, but this is music I know just as well and need as much). Think also, perhaps, of The Cure's "Homesick" (I came to that later).
Then it fades as softly as anything (so it is not isolated after all, and others are in the room) into Wolfstone's greatest piece, "J-Time". Hanging weightlessly over a synthesised ambient drone with wordless coos for a minute, the deep breath before it is time to proceed, the band come in steady and collected, a forlorn Celtic melody central to its slightly swinging fabric and Andy's jazzy piano solo downcast but subtly stunning. It adds some explanation, of sorts, to "John Simmers" in that it is not resigned but, in my ears, yearning for a state (a feeling, or environment) it knows can still exist. If this sounds flowery bare in mind that for me that's precisely what it is, as it brings back some of the happiest of all memories; as a very young boy, listening to CDs with my dad in the conservatory, making compilations of Village Pump Festival music and enjoying the wonder of it and its music with, as with all music I loved back then, nascent, sculpting wide-eyes. So yes, melancholia galore, but the melancholy here is particularly so because of what it symbolises, and it is blissful. My dad still considers its a "great chill tune", and it's music for me that, as with much of Seven, allows me to step beside myself and into my fables times, and in doing this, things can be put back into perspective upon my re-entry into earth. This is the genuine power of nostalgia for someone like myself (but maybe the argument there is one I can have another day).
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