FOLK
BY JIM WIRTH
Stick In The Wheel
★★★★
A Thousand Pokes
FROM HERE. CD/DL/LP
Crafty Cockneys reject the English pastoral.
The pearly queen and king of modernist London song, Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter deliver a filthy pea-souper with their fourth studio album, a determinedly ungentrified vision of misrule from the capital’s margins. With thudding percussion, distorted guitars and eerie Auto-Tune deepening Stick In The Wheel’s slightly gleeful vision of a world galloping out of control, A Thousand Pokes stirs up old ballads and broadsides (Brisk Lad or sucker’s lament Cracks), sentimental street songs (Lavender; What Can The Matter Be?) and political material (Watercress-O) into an apocalyptic Bertolt Brecht stew: knees up, Mother Courage. “We’re born to walk on rotten ground,” Kearey states mournfully on Burnt Walk, and here Stick In The Wheel are sure-footed with their daunting urban music of defiance. Nymphs and shepherds run away; nasty urchins rule OK.