An extraordinary reworking of one of the most brilliantly evocative albums of recent times, Elizabeth Bernholz’s 2018 LP Pastoral is re-animated with electronic drone choir NYX to create equally profound and disturbing versions of seven songs and a new title track. The album comes off the back of a series of smoky, ghostly performances that developed out of Pastoral. The central premise is England’s divided identity, evoked through the prism of the medieval and beyond, and summoned up with images of village squares of torture and public executions, flies buzzing around the dead, xenophobia and tea-room gossip that removes the quixotic and bucolic from the quaint, replacing it with the queasy. It’s also devastating picture of the so-called green and pleasant England – past and present. In this new album the beats are mostly replaced with dark, echoing Gregorian hood-wearing voices adding a whole new echoing dimension of ancient ecclesiastics and rumbling electronics. The title track contains distorted baritone that is wonderfully disturbing.
Pastoral’s jerkily agitated and whisperingly angry Hobby Horse is absent, but that original is simply too good to change. But here there are fabulously radical new versions that include the church bell-tolling Glory, the warbled, twisting Bulgarian-style voices of Folly, and FIre Leap’s recreation of some fertility ritual that could have come from The Wicker Man. Better In My Day has the most similarity with the original, except this incredible company of voices replaces electronic beats with throat work, topped with a wonderfully high warble. Throne captures the voice of a timeless collector of debts, and souls, as some vengeful, torturous water god, with some phrasing ands sounds that remind of passages from Kate Bush’s Under Ice and Waking the Witch from the second side of Hounds of Love. And finally, and most fabulously frightening, is Golden Dawn, a 13-minute odyssey where the vocals reach huge depths and heights of the most ethereal and terrifying. Aided in the choir by Adélaïde Pratoussy, Cecilia Forssberg, Elizabeth Bernholz, Natalie Sharp (who has also released music as Lone Taxidermist), Ruth Corey, Shireen Qureshi and Sian O’Gorman, there won’t be a more powerful and original album out this year. Out on NYX Collective Records.
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