Tag Archives: Fruit Tree Records Of The Year

Fruit Tree Records Of The Year, Records of 2021

Spellling – The Turning Wheel

Trying to keep your finger on the pulse of music, if your interests and tastes align to the Fruit Tree Records approach, involves casting your net far and wide. I am engaging daily with radio shows, internet mixes, magazine reviews, online reviews and navigating my way through many streaming platforms; in addition to all that I remain what I have been all my life, a vinyl record collector and crate digger. You would think that all these avenues merge into a well-oiled music finding system but oh no, really there is no such formular and it is the randomness that keeps this journey exciting. What I can tell you is this: stay open minded, do not limit your interests to one genre or era and I guarantee wonderful surprises will come into your life every single day. It really is mind numbingly impossible to comprehend just how much amazing music is being created every year; even more awe inspiring is just how much made over the past century remains under appreciated. Of course, the opposite holds true as well, but if there were not so much attention seeking dross muscling its way into peoples ears all the time, there would be no thrill or reward in uncovering the good stuff. ‘The Turning Wheel’ by Spellling is one such hidden gem from 2021.

I genuinely cannot recall how I came across Spellling in 2021, I suspect I made a note after hearing something on a radio show or a DJ mix, something like that, which resulted in the album sitting in my ‘things to listen to’ pile earlier in the year. What I can recall exactly, is my incredibly positive reaction to hearing the album. Beyond positive, I was bowled over, left aghast, or high even on the discovery of something so wonderful. An album that seemed to tick so many of the boxes and styles of music I regard as important to me. These were great songs, incredibly strong on melody, heavy on impact and full of earworms that linger on and on. But it was showy too, not so much power ballads but theatrical concept pieces…on ice! I joke of course, but the music was a dizzying melting pot of ideas. Jazzy but not jazz; progressive but not prog, bluesy without a twelve-bar template in sight and there were even hints of the show tune to some of the emoting, but without the teeth and the jazz hands. Impossible to put in a box and yet undeniably fantastic. How could something as brilliant as this fly so far under the radar I wondered? Well, look around and it is not such a rare tale, the business end of the music world rarely values craftsmanship over easily marketable, immediately profitable product. Sometimes it feels like the only winners are us collectors, free to discover these wonders then share them out. But Spellling is hopefully aware that, if nothing else, these are the albums that endure over time. Those unaware of Spellling today that will surely not say the same tomorrow, for the good stuff does tend to rise to the surface eventually.

Spellling is the performing identity of Chrystia Cabral, she released this third album under the name in 2021. Entitled ‘The Turning Wheel,’ it is a mesmerizing song cycle packed with theatricality and magical pop wonder. A double LP well worth investigating on vinyl, the first record is the dreamier and more positive of the two, it has the collective title of ‘Above’ while the more somber, darker tones of the second disc are titled ‘Below.’ The fact that this is an expansive as well as expressive song suite, executing orchestral brush strokes and dynamic punctuation points leads to me recalling Kate Bush. And while this is an entirely worthy comparison, Spellling is an entity with its own unique grain. Cabral’s early influences were not contemporary, she has spoken in the past of how she soaked up the 70s and 80s sounds sourced from family record collections. One primary influence she has acknowledged is Minnie Riperton and there, amongst lush orchestral passages and wide-eyed sense of wonder, is a line towards Riperton’s own ‘Come To My Garden’ LP detectable. It is clearly a psychedelic reference point inside the Spellling mold, but the influences do not dominate at all.

Cabral has not arrived at this third album new to ambitious composition ideas but previously her tools were limited to electronics and synths. This time, with over thirty orchestral musicians at her disposal as well as a little extra lockdown time to develop ideas further, she has fine-tuned her vision into something incredible. It feels to me like there was a certain point in her career when she realized you do not need to follow a previously walked path, just being open to her own ideas and seeing where they lead would be enough. ‘The Turning Wheel’ seems like both a culmination and a definitive justification for following that instinct. It is a stunning achievement that I hope attracts the large audience it deserves. The albums stands as an elegant concept piece concerning life, life cycles, death, our hopes for the future, our fears and the constantly evolving nature of reality. A song like ‘Emperor With An Egg’ pulls at all those tensions while ‘Magic Act,’ a centerpiece on the darker second disc, simmers like a heavy thunderstorm forming in the distance.

Despite my having begun to pick out song highlights at this stage of the review, I must state that this is one of those records that must be sampled as a whole. That is how it has been constructed even though the songs are all melodically rich enough to stand alone as individual tracks. And while many of the lyrical themes like love and true friendship, as sung about on the title track, are touched upon abstractly, Cabral can flick the switch and sting the listener with something direct and forthright. ‘Boys At School’ is one example of this, with an unfiltered lyric dramatically singing about adolescent trauma. Overall, though, the shimmering lyrical twists and the boundless musical turns must be experienced firsthand. Which is exactly why I am flagging ‘The Turning Wheel’ as one of the outstanding albums of 2021. This is one for people who really love to lock in, listen and engage; the rewards inside these grooves are many.

Find a physical copy of ‘The Turning Wheel’ here: https://amzn.to/4wxzulg

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Fruit Tree Records Of The Year, Records of 2021

Yola – Stand For Myself

Whether as a featured vocalist for Massive Attack or front woman to the Americana outfit Phantom Limb, Yola Carter has been a low-key presence on the music scene for a couple of decades now. The impression you get now that she has fully burst onto the scene is that in those years, she quietly readied herself for the spotlight and always held a little something back for the day it arrived. How else do you explain a full force gale like this? She does not come across like a singer who naturally sits in the background, this is a woman with a commanding authority at the microphone and a hard-to-dent conviction in the words she imparts. She shouts without bawling, it is a no bullshit approach, the kind that only comes from a true voice with a vision singing from the heart. And even though this is in fact her second solo LP release, I find myself comparing it to something like the first George Harrison solo album. It is that magical moment when an artist who has previously jostled to find their space, finally finds a footing, turns on the tap and watches the music come flooding on down.

I stop short of calling ‘Stand For Myself’ one of the outstanding Soul albums of 2021 because, musically, it is so much more than that. Yola has explained in interviews how she simply grew up loving music; music that she heard on the radio, music she found in her mother’s record collection, whatever spoke to her emotionally she soaked it all up. It has resulted in this, an album that is a mesmerizing mixture of all her influences but not exactly like any of them. In doing so she has created that rare thing that not all artists can effectively realize; her own sound, this record introduces to the world the Yola sound. Impossible to pigeonhole and undeniably belonging to nobody else.

Her solo work truly began in 2019 with the Dan Auerbach produced ‘Walk Through Fire’. I did pay a little bit of attention to that album, mainly because something in the way it was marketed and in Yola’s image caught my attention, it looked like the kind of rootsy soul record I would be into. And it was indeed a good piece, but it did not register in the album of the year stakes or anything like that, maybe it lacked the unique identity so prevalent on this follow up? The Black Keys Auerbach has produced once more, but this time Yola’s own personality is a lot more visible. The creative period of lockdown facilitated this a little, affording the artist time to work out what she really wanted to do with her music. The array of collaborators and writing partners have also opened the possibilities. In addition to the producer there is also Natalie Hemby from the Highwomen, Ruby Amanfu who has performed in the backing singer department for Jack White as well as the quietly brilliant pop master Aaron Lee Tasjan.

The tune Tasjan contributed to, ‘Diamond Studded Shoes,’ is an early album stand out. As a rousing song it is shot with a rare realism. It is very much a call to arms in sound and style yet in anticipating if things would turn out right it emphatically answers, “we know it isn’t, we know it isn’t.” That alone typifies an underlying motivation throughout, in that Yola has viewed this album as a chance to get real, a chance to unleash the soul power at the heart of what she does while simultaneously refraining from presenting things in a one-dimensional way. Musically this leaves the door open for a multitude of influences to reveal themselves. Among the tracks there is everything from Brill Building pop craft, Sister Rosetta Tharpe style electric gospel, Black Keys riffage, Philadelphia soul lushness and even a hint of Freedom Singers folk protest poking through. Lyrically, what has poured onto the page is social, political, personal, lived and learned street wisdom. She is not just going to blindly say everything is going to be OK when she knows better, but do not deny her right to hope for improvements and to stand up and fight for her beliefs.

Any album where claims for ‘best of the year’ status are made should, as a baseline requirement, be without any weak tracks or filler. ‘Stand For Myself’ definitively fits those criteria, from start to finish the songwriting standard is high and the range of emotional textures visited upon are dizzying. ‘Dancing Away In Tears’ is arguable the records smoothest soul moment, it has late night pop classic written all over it. By contrast to that tunes widescreen production, ‘If I Had To Do It All Again’ leaves sonic space for the catchy melody to breathe. The rhythm stutters, the bassline punches while the guitar executes savage knife slices, the effect is both dramatic and cool. ‘Whatever You Want’ has one of those low-hanging-fruit kind of melodies that sounds like it has been around forever. That fact alone invests the song with a self-assured strut. Finally, title track ‘Stand For Myself’ has undeniable sunrise chord progressions. It makes for music that incredibly evokes light overwhelming the darkness as Yola testifies “I used to feel nothing like you, now I’m alive, I’m alive!” For real!

You can buy a physical copy of the album here: https://amzn.to/3OUg7BW

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Fruit Tree Records Of The Year, Records of 2021

Declan O’Rourke – Arrivals

As Declan O’Rourke released ‘Arrivals’ in the early part of 2021 the talk was all about how this would finally be his moment. After two decades of being the songwriter’s songwriter, this well-kept secret would start to enjoy the recognition he so richly deserved. Ah, predictions very rarely pan out in such a straightforward fashion, in fact as we enter 2022 the side to Declan’s creative output that is enjoying newfound time in the spotlight is his prose writing. He had spent a prolonged period of the lockdown completing his first ever novel, a fact-based fiction called ‘The Pawn Brokers Record.’ Set in a six-month period during the 1845-1848 Irish Famine, O’Rourke had disciplined himself to writing at his desk for six-hour sessions, seven days a week. And in terms of success and exposure, the end product saw his book appear at number four in the best sellers lists on the first week of publication.

Those bold predictions of success and recognition for the album were largely based on the name of the producer, Paul Weller. It always did look a bit fanciful to suggest that fact alone would see the waves of appreciation arrive at Declan’s door. If there is one thing Weller has done consistently throughout his career, it is respecting the soul of any music in which he is involved. He is not going to muscle in with his own voice and sound trying to make a Weller-typical recording, he has too much class for that kind of stunt. But he did do a fantastic job on production; if the producer’s role is to tap into the essence of an artist and facilitate the realization of that performers sound on vinyl, then he did exactly what was required. Yes, Weller is there on the back cover, regularly cropping up in the song credits on either guitar, piano and harmonium and he also brings in a collaborator of his own in Hannah Peel on gorgeous string arrangements, but the stars of this show are O’Rourke, his weather battered Irish voice, his dexterous guitar playing and those wonderful character driven songs.

Weller’s own connection with O’Rourke began with his appreciation of the man’s earlier work, especially the song ‘Galileo’ which the senior Mod went on record describing as the only song he wished he had written in the last thirty years. The story goes that the producer wanted to hear the songs before committing to proceed but you have to say, it would be a shock if he had passed on these compositions. ‘Arrivals’ is a collection of songs that sees Declan often looking inward, examining his relationship with his craft and his place in a creative industry. He appears to be explicitly addressing this on opener ‘In Painter’s Light’ and yet, as often happens on this LP, the song expands into a broader meditation on the purity of dreams, how the things you hold close to your heart can be so easily crushed when life does not always line up with your inner plans.

Wider topics are written about with equal aplomb, take ‘Convict Ways’ and it’s definite depiction of transport ships moving convicts over to Australia. The song does not merely settle on dry description, it states that progress has not moved far enough away from the days of “being slaves without the name of slaves.” And ‘Have You Not Heard The War Is Over’ may just be one of the finest anti-war folk songs ever written. Not simply because of the way Declan precisely deconstructs the many shady positions that justified past conflicts in the first place, nor for the undeniable way he puts humanitarianism at the forefront of his position. No, it is also because this song has a damn fine folk chorus that can be sung along with instantly and stays in the musical part of your brain long after the album is over.

‘Andy Sells Coke’ begins as a critical, advisory take down of a delusional character dealing to fund his own drug habit. Again though, the song turns inward to focus on the singer himself passed out in a chair when he should have long since grown out of that kind of behavior. “I’m too old in the tooth to be round this shit” the number concludes. O’Rourke often arrives at the core of a song in the moment when his lyric writing turns in on himself. ‘The Harbour’ might seem like a straight-ahead tale of an old gardener and an introspective tiler and the life lessons they have acquired along the way, once more though, the writer looms into view, recognizing in himself a hunger and desperation to uncork the inner heart and soul of all he encounters to feed into his own creativity. Picturing his own turbulent waters, where “every wind has a tail,” the singer longs for the relative sanctuary of the harbour. Well, with ‘Arrivals,’ every song really does have a tale and they are all performed by an honest craftsman taking his work seriously and investing with all the passion and feeling it demands. This is a fine piece of folk, singer-songwriter work that could not have been better executed and easily one of the finest we heard in this classic style during 2021.

You can buy a physical copy of ‘Arrivals’ here: https://amzn.to/4wjc56Z

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