The Crowing

A striking album of fresh explorations into the more obscure corners and bridleways of English music and folklore, The Crowing draws on old manuscript collections, 18th-century love songs and murder ballads – often from some fascinatingly offbeat sources. ‘His Night Waking’, for example, comes from professor A Roger Ekirch from Virginia Tech, and his researches into the separate ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’ that he has found to have been part of the nocturnal patterns of a pre-electrified, industrialised society – both praying and sex were apparently popular between-sleep pastimes.

Bird in the Belly comprise alt-folk musician Jinnwoo, folk duo Hickory Signals, multi-instrumentalist Tom Pryor and artist-musician Epha Roe. They have delved into the Bodleian and Cecil Sharp collections, as well as regional poetry collections from the 19th century, to create a musically diverse, fresh and compelling set of songs. They begin with the hopeless pining of ‘Give Me Back My Heart Again’ and continue onto the ‘Welsh Ploughboy’, which tells of a high-born woman's lust for a farm worker, and ‘Verses on Daniel Good’, singing of Good's gruesome murder of his pregnant girlfriend, a crime which led to the creation of the nation's first national detective agency. ‘The Duke of Grafton’ was a diamond in Bert Lloyd's repertoire, but Bird in the Belly's intense, elegiac version has lyrical variants and fine violin from Tom Pryor. The Crowing is a fascinating debut from a distinctive new group.