LESS THAN 1
TEMPO DI LETTURA MIN
FOLK
BY JIM WIRTH
Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver
★★★★
Hinterland
EAR TO THE GROUND. CD/LP
Balham siren explores the darkness at the edge of town.
“Dormant clay, substation, stately home, sewage works,” recites Lisa Knapp on Train Song, the ‘say what you see’ guide to modern Britain that sets out the stall for her first album to be jointly credited to her partner Gerry Diver. Hinterland casts Diver and Knapp as the edgelord and lady of modern folk, her uncanny voice and his subtly deployed fiddle anchoring a trad-arr exploration of points where the banal tips into the properly unsettling. Ex-raver Knapp gets her glow-sticks out for a reckoning with the ancients on Star Carr, and hits all the Throbbing Gristle-creepy notes on a crawl through folk-slasher Long Lankin. Her deliciously slow renditions of Lass Of Aughrim and I Must Away Love, meanwhile, veer into sexy Gavin Bryars minimalism as they replant these ancient songs among the pylon buzz and fly-tipped grot of the 21st century. A marginal marvel.