Alt. folker Will Oldham - better known as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - is set to drop a joint record with gently psychedelic crew Trembling Bells
Just four years after their debut album Carbeth, Trembling Bells are amassing a formidable body of work at a startling velocity. Just twelve months after the release of their critically acclaimed third album The Constant Pageant, the Glasgow quartet return to share the billing with a similarly restless creative spirit. A few thousand miles separate Will Oldham and Trembling Bells' drummer and principal songwriter Alex Neilson, but their stories intersect as far back as 2005, when the young Leeds-raised Neilson found himself playing drums on Alasdair Roberts' No Earthly Man, with Oldham producing. In time, a friendship between mentor and student became one between two kindred musicians. Neilson augmented his work with free-psych-drone practitioners Directing Hand by playing with the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy band. The drummer's eagerness to experience new epiphanies yielded unforgettable memories. In Big Sur, he recalls, 'we took mushrooms at midnight, then visited a natural hot spring built into the dramatic cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The stars were as vivid as frozen fireworks.' All of which is worth dwelling on, because without that background of mutual openness and empathy, it's hard to imagine The Marble Downs existing.
Neilson recalls a conversation about a 'collaboration' in the summer of 2010, though stresses that it 'was nothing too formal at first'. By the end of that year, a limited-edition seven-inch New Year's Eve Is The Loneliest Night of the Year showed what an inspired match the vocals of Trembling Bells singer Lavinia Blackwall and Will Oldham made. The cut-glass precision of the classically-trained student of medieval music and the worldly, careworn tones of Oldham created an unlikely chemistry. It must have seemed that way to Neilson too. He set about assembling a cache of songs with the purpose of further harnessing that chemistry. The result is an album that has, once again, redrafted the boundaries of what Trembling Bells can achieve together. Indeed, genre-lines aren't terribly helpful this time around. Yes, Trembling Bells' love affair with traditional music remains a constant — most emphatically so on the unaccompanied Blackwall/Oldham two-hander, My Husband's Got No Courage In Him. Then there is Blackwall's musical setting of Dorothy Parker's poem Excursion Into Assonance — and the thorough-going new-found classicism of Neilson's increasingly assured songwriting. Albeit delivered with Trembling Bells' rain-lashed sense of abandon, Love Is A Velvet Noose sounds like a standard of sorts — a warped consequence of Neilson's increasing fascination with the songbooks of Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael. 'I'm not saying I stand any chance of emulating them,' he adds, 'but the appreciation is definitely there.'
The knowledge that Oldham and Blackwall would be sharing centre-stage on The Marble Downs gave Neilson extra impetus to flex his songwriting muscles. I Can Tell You're Leaving finds both vocalists on irresistible form, dissecting their dying relationship with no heed to the other's feelings. 'You treat me like a child,' sings Oldham. 'I need a man,' she responds, barely catching breath. 'Now like Merle Haggard, you'll see the fighting side of me,' he later promises. 'I guess that's one of the lighter moments on the album,' ponders Neilson, 'I was trying to get a Planet Waves-era Bob Dylan feel there, with the piano and walking bassline.'
Here and elsewhere, the band — Blackwall, Neilson, bassist Simon Shaw and guitarist Mike Hastings — has never sounded more psychically attuned to one-other. On the slow-reveal sonic establishing shot of I Made A Date (With An Open Vein), two minutes of manic modal chaos elapses before Oldham takes the narrative reins of a majestic call-and-response folk-rock epic. The electrifying free-folk portent of Riding — a revival of the Palace Brothers classic — is no less compelling, calling to mind the words of broadcaster Stuart Maconie when he praised Trembling Bells for their ability to invoke simultaneously 'the charm of folk music and the power of rock.' Ditto Ain't Nothing Wrong With A Little Longing, in which Neilson slams down a four-to-the-floor beat over a synergy of demonic krautrock keys and a dialogue between Oldham and Blackwall that scales Nancy & Lee levels of romantic intrigue.
With nine songs gone and one remaining, the album's sonic undulations find an arresting denouement in the form of an inspired cover. Adapted from Robin Gibb's 1970 solo masterpiece Robin's Reign, Lord Bless All sees Trembling Bells tease out the hymnal qualities of Gibb's original with a slow volcanic upswell which — on four minutes — explodes into heavy psychedelic technicolour. What pleases Alex Neilson when he listens back is 'a sense of a common vocabulary and identity being forged.' If, by that, he means that there isn't another band on the planet that quite sounds like Trembling Bells, it would be hard to disagree. The evidence is right here.
'I didn't know anything about Trembling Bells. I just heard them and was knocked out. I instantly became a fan.' Paul Weller
'Trembling Bells are my kind of band.' Joe Boyd
"Jesus fucking shit! These jamz claw so hard at the tatties below methinks the Lord misnamed them, having intended to say Trembling BALLS." Will Oldham
'A poetic incantation of British identity far brighter than Michael Gove's GCSE syllabus.' Stewart Lee
'This time, I'm attempting to reclaim the art of songwriting from the charity shop bargain bin.' Alex Neilson
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