Lovely horses and music lovers rejoice - Cathy’s back with an expansive new album seeped in the mysteries and beauty of nature that charms and baffles in equal measure
Cathy Davey weaves a real mix of mystery and magic on her first album in six years. Written in the deep woods near Portumna and recorded in Connemara, New Forest is as knotted and textured as the trees that have inspired her.
She takes the forest analogy to extremes on several songs; Birdie is a spooked madrigal turned rock-out about a towering 300-year-old Elm that terrorises a local town and the haunted fairytale continues on Chrysocoma, a kooky ode to a weeping golden willow that ends very badly indeed.
The woozy And Then I Eat It, which was inspired by what Davey has called “an OCD squirrel”, and Bucket, a winsome sea shanty celebrating the joys of naturism in the forest, take her deeper and deeper into the woods.
New Forest is an imaginarium of sights, sounds and smells in which Davey hefts her “new toys” of melodeon, glockenspiel, autoharp and omnichord to beguiling affect as she darts, wraith-like, in and out of that petrified forest on otherworldly moments that recall the sublime mysteries of Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs.
Arrow’s dreamy syncopation gives way to a jaunty bossanova/ska lilt that Astrud Gilberto would be proud to call her own. Davey’s back trembling on the edge of a dream on Thylacine, which - obviously - is about an extinct dog-like Tasmanian Tiger and the twinkling My Old Man, which is not dedicated to her partner Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy but her dog Rex.
No matter - it sounds like someone has a bad case of amour fou down among those towering elms.
Alan Corr @corralan
