A trenchant songwriter, since 2008 the collective Red River Dialect has been the Cornish guitarist and wordsmith David John Morris’s musical vehicle of choice. Back with the band after a couple of well-received solo albums in Monastic Love Songs and Wyld Love Songs – companion pieces which traced the spiritual fulfilment and sense of community he found during stints at a Buddhist monastery in Canada and a guardianship in North London upon his return home – the new Red River Dialect record Basic Country Mustard continues to muck together the sacred and the mundane.
Stretching back to the ancients, the title tune for instance turns a gilded history of the condiment into a figurative guide for self-realisation while the opening track ‘This Restlessness’ dwells in impish yet pungent fashion on ‘paths not taken’, blending in Red River Dialect’s native manner traditional folk airs redolent of a broadside ballad with the psychedelia of the sixties and the California sound. Delving once more into the annals of time, ‘Torrey Canyon, Lyonesse’ brings together Arthurian or local Cornish legend and one of the world’s worst environmental disasters, all centred upon the Seven Stones reef off the southwest coast of England while on ‘Again, Again’ the singer and bandleader gestures heartrendingly towards the only footage of his family from when he and his sister were young.
Community tends to carry the ghosts of solitude and loneliness in Morris’s work while commonality is imperilled by a headlong rush for freedom of creed and choice. Decay lurks everywhere. More rarely his songs resolve themselves into moments of bliss, a kind of contentment however fleeting which is found more through immanence than transcendence, as on the standout ‘Ballad of Ross Wyld’ from Wyld Love Songs where he notes a ‘limerence problem’ but gets caught up in the movie Hook and a cherry tree.
Seeing some of himself and his fellow residents in the Lost Boys and fretting over Rufio’s iconic death before the cherry tree helps to crystallise his newfound sense of home, here Morris identifies the power and perhaps also the implicit danger of his vocation in its capacity to transfer or sublimate life’s passions through song. Yet on the wistful and wracked ‘Again, Again’ he opens with an indelible image – that of his three-year-old sister being chased through the woods by their father and dog Jake, completing a loop only to cry out happily ‘again, again’ – and quietly, lovingly bludgeons it as he wishes to free long-captive memories and reunite with departed friends.
Basic Country Mustard does reconvene old regulars with Morris playing guitars and the Latin American cuatro while Simon Drinkwater returns on guitars and a burbling, apparitional harp. Edd Sanders contributes the droning accents or more noodling and unassuming airs of his fiddle plus pipes, Robin Lane-Roberts buttresses the compositions through sustained keys and Rose Kindred-Boothby on bass and Kiran Bhatt on drums make up a bounding or loping rhythm section. Meanwhile the Italian singer-songwriter Laura Loriga joins the fray, her cooing backing vocals adding texture and depth akin to a rustling wind or a handful of stones tossed down a steep well, serving as a winning addition to the ensemble.
The murmuring, gently restive ‘Sheep’s Clothing’ finds Morris hanging on after the tail end of a relationship both humping his baggage and finding a certain sour yet comforting joy in staying put, a conundrum captured in the lines ‘and I can’t say that I will go wherever the wind takes me / there’s a stone in my belly’ before Sanders’ bowed drone helps the song crest its summit. ‘Discontinuity’ with its romping rhythms and whistling spurts adds a shot of sonic levity while ‘Curse is Broken’ draws Basic Country Mustard to a close through a Celtic swell of uilleann pipes.
With a telling eye and a confiding mode of delivery, the apparent sloshing and rambling character of Red River Dialect’s work belies their penchant for delicate harmonies and a kind of condensed narrative force. My favourite song from the album is ‘Ghost River 29’, which serves as a curt and spectral centrepiece. Gesturing towards the fable of the scorpion and the frog, the lyrics ostensibly pertain to a failed marriage as Morris in hushed tones sings:
You arrived with poetry and whale song
It called to part of me which had for so long
Been looking for a scorpion to love
I offered my hand, threw away the glove
Crusty bread and apricot conserve
I could not see that just beyond the curve
That you would say yes and take the ring
I watched it shine, I didn’t see the sting
Fittingly for such a songwriter, the use of slant rhymes between couplets helps to make the seemingly throwaway line about crusty bread and apricot jam feel like one of the most vivid and telling moments on the entire record, another harmony of opposites however fleeting, the having before the holding and the calm before the storm.
Morris turns the resulting ‘abyss’ into a lesson learned on ‘Ghost River 29′ as the component parts of Red River Dialect unite to stunning effect: the shifting bedrock of guitar, bass and drums, Loriga’s softly spoken yet reverberating backing vocals, Lane-Roberts’ plunging keys, Sanders’ droning fiddle and the haunted stresses and accents of Drinkwater’s harp which urges comparison with some of Joanna Newsom’s most anxious and piercing missives, on songs like ‘Baby Birch’ and ‘Go Long’ from her freewheeling triple album Have One on Me.
Plumbing the depths of experience and coming away from it all with a stronger sense of self, Morris says ‘I know if I’d not felt abandoned / There would be a place in me unfathomed’ and with a modicum of deference or respect identifies another fork in the road, adding ‘When I was there, I was offered hate / As a way to make the suffering abate / I know how ghost river in me flows / I also know the suffering I chose’. Diving deep and not drowning but opting instead to keep on moving on, for Morris and his band this is a deft and sometimes rollicking journey, a stay of friendship and a steadfast effort to acknowledge one’s shadows while leaving them flickering in the rear view.
