FOLK
BY JIM WIRTH
Hack-Poets Guild ★★★★
Blackletter Garland
ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT. CD/DL/LP
Fright phoebus: folkie power trio sex up ancient scandal sheets.
“I cut a man’s throat and to a stake the judge chained me,” sings Marry Waterson on the gory-locks shaking Ten Tongues, the opening track on her collaboration with Lisa Knapp and experimental composer Nathaniel Mann seemingly narrated by a murderer’s rotting corpse. Reanimating songs and stories taken from broadsides (the penny dreadfuls of the 16th to 19th centuries), Blackletter Garland delights in gothic oddness and is pleasingly playful too; Knapp’s Daring Highwayman transports the Fun Boy Three to Regency Britain, while her startling, Dagmar Krause-ish take on workers’ lament Troubles Of This World is accompanied by knowing Venus In Furs string slashes. The Hack-Poets Guild’s vision of modernity can skew a bit trip-hoppy, but there’s no disputing their feel for the grand drama of their material. In all its sticky deadness, it lives.