Track Listing:
- Rosemarie
- Glowworm
- Under the Trees
- Dance With The Sea
- Labyrinth
- Oak And Ash
- The Moon Is A Pearl
- The Sun Is Coming Out
Big Bertha Records
Release date: 21.01.08
Thistletown on MySpace
Rosemarie
Thistletown
As a band Thistletown seem have achieved a mythic sheen to their lives already; they live on a boat and don't own a car; they all met serendipitously; they take their inspiration from nature; Their performance at the 2007 Green Man Festival has already transformed into the stuff of legend, being judged the 'most folkie' of the assembled acts.
Their debut album is an ethereal masterpiece, it will inevitably attract descriptions such as psych, acid,or prog folk, but something so innocent should have a less ugly description. The Big Bertha web site defines it as 'pre-Raphaelite English romantic music' and indeed it paints scenes of romantic pastoral bliss with a thoroughly English veneration of nature that the pre-Raphaelite's strove to weave into their art.
Their sound harks back to the 70's folk personified by the likes of Tree's, Pentangle, Fairport and Jade, who all hover in the wings. Their MySpace entry describes them as sounding like "...drunken faeries singing with sailors through seashells, gypsies dancing through heather on the first of May."
The lyrics evoke subconscious golden memories of a better time when we lived so much closer to the natural world around us. When sung by the angel voiced Lydia and Tiffany a line like "...how pleasant is the greenwoods deep matted shade on a midsummer's eve when the fresh rain is all over" sounds so sweet and pure that one wants to nestle down into their gentle embrace and forget the hurly burly all around, they lay their cool hand on your brow and whisper sweet rhymes from the Greenwood in your ear.
Rosemarie is an album that oozes innocence, not one particle of it is contrived or calculated. At just eight tracks it leaves you wanting so much more, a salutary lesson in less-is-more. Recorded in and around a cottage in Cornwall, mixed in Ludlow, Shropshire by Michael Tyack of Circulus and Benet Walsh of Deep Elem. It's released on the Big Bertha label, the brainchild of that living musical experiment; Will Hodgkinson. Author of Guitar Man and now Song Man, he seems the perfect maverick individual to cherish and nurture Thistletown.
Iain Hazlewood