Burd Ellen - "A Tarot of the Green Wood": Forward-thinking Scottish drone folk

The seven songs on this third studio album from Burd Ellen, the Glasgow-based project featuring Debbie Armour and Gayle Brogan, came together during the duo’s 2021 residency at Sage Gateshead. Indeed, keen-eared listeners may hear the distinctive sound of Tyneside’s urban kittiwakes in the latter half of ‘The Lovers’ (all tracks are named after cards in a tarot deck).

The first release on Armour’s new label, Mavis Recordings, album opener ‘The Fool’ - a version of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ used by Irish dramatist George Farquhar in his 1706 play The Recruiting Officer - is marked by the striking juxtaposition of Armour’s sweet-toned vocals and Brogan’s granitic drone. 

Anthologised in the Child Ballads, the traditional song ‘Fair Annie’ (here called ‘The High Priestess & The Hierophant’) unfolds over an ear-catching, slowly shifting textural backdrop of synth pads and sorrowing fiddle lines. 

Armour is at her most beguiling on a supremely atmospheric, slow-motion take on ‘When I Was on Horseback’ (‘The Chariot’), which features Lankum piper Ian Lynch in its impressive wall of sound. 

Finally, Newcastle-based composer Mark Wardlaw guests on the entirely a cappella ‘Death’, a surprising vignette based on the final stanza of Alexander Pope’s, ‘Ode on Solitude’.