DANNY PEDLER & GREG RUSSELL - Field And Dyke
Private Label PEDL0012
An intriguing collaboration, this, derived from an oral history and arts engagement project in Lincolnshire’s South Holland district – for non-geographers, that’s the southernmost area of the county, the more East Anglian part.
Something that impressed me about the songwriting was that it avoided glossing over tensions about immigrant labour, a divisive issue often associated with the town of Boston, a little further north. The album features extracts from the oral history recordings, especially at either end of the CD, and there are also found sounds of an industrial nature: machine rhythms drive some of the tracks, including the wonderfully named Delta 3000 LD SB XY Plastic Presser (it’s an instrumental!).
The writing is split Danny (6), Greg (3), jointly-composed (2) and one ‘trad. arr.’. There is a fair amount of slow, almost lugubrious music, and my favourite song was one of the up-tempo numbers, the jointly-written S.K.Y. (“you should see the sky round here” – an apposite comment if you know the area).
This is an album that requires and rewards concentrated listening – if your default option is listening to CDs in the background while doing the ironing, this probably isn’t for you. But if you like deeper listening and find the background interesting, Field And Dyke is worth searching out. Live dates showcasing the material are due to follow in January 2020.
www.gregrussellfolk.co.uk
Paul Mansfield
This review appeared in Issue 130 of The Living Tradition magazine