Forge

This young four-piece came together on the music course at the University of East Anglia and the expansiveness of the open fenland skies is conveyed in their music – an intriguing marriage of folk and classical influences that meanders with only occasional moments of song interrupting the meditative calm.

Two fiddle-driven tunes open the album, followed by ‘Lovely on the Water’, a song collected by Vaughan Williams in 1908 that runs into a tune from the composer's ‘Norfolk Rhapsody’. This is the kind of texture the players – fiddler Ross Grant, Nick Sanchez-Ray on banjo, guitarist James Porter and accordionist Andy Weeks – bring to their second album together. The sparse elegance brings to mind not only the East Anglian landscape, but also the statelier pace of the Edwardian age of Vaughan Williams. It is thoughtful and reflective music, suggesting an intriguing new direction for English folk even as it looks back over its shoulder. The delicate, hypnotic phrases – such as the plucked banjo lines on ‘Murmuration’ that seem to musically echo the movements of a flock of starlings – build into a whole that feels greater than its constituent parts.