Queer Folk: ‘Faerie Fire Dances’ album review.
Faerie Fire Dances
by Marc Block
Album and Launch
Glasspool Music
A stalwart of the UK folk scene, Marc Block would usually spend his summers as a travelling minstrel, performing in festivals across England from Towersey to Castle Carrock. This year, he’s been as corralled as the rest of us. Block launched his third album from his living room — albeit tented with pagan finery, the artist himself appearing as a combination of The Green Man and a rainbow haired wizard — in a live-stream, solo acoustic rendering of his new album. The singer-songwriter has put his furloughed time to good use, casting spells and stirring them as lyrics into the slowly bubbling cauldron that is Faerie Fire Dances; a jaunty, eclectic bundle of tracks crafted as tribute to, and with contributions from, the Radical Faeries of Albion.
The Radical Faeries are the legacy of the hippy end of America’s first gay organisations, now morphed into an international collective of queer, polyamorous, multi-spiritual, gender fluid celebrants who often live together communally to sing and dance and drag and beat drums beneath the light of the moon. Their energy provides a drumming pulse that powers much of Faerie Fire Dances. Block’s Faerie songs are supplemented with well assimilated covers and folk standards, guaranteeing everyone a sing along. Although restricted to harmonica and acoustic guitar during his living room launch, Block’s beautifully weathered baritone sonorities are backed by multiple seasoned accompanists on the Tom Wright produced studio album.
The album opens with the eponymous ‘Faerie Fire’, a call to a Radical Faerie gathering in which Block’s hailing voice is lifted to the wind by drone and clattering drums and woven in and out of choral chanting provided by Nancy Kerr, James Fagan and Sheila Chandra. With new lyrics written to the tune of an old Appalachian hymn, the title track initiates the album’s blend of the traditional with a queerer content.
Block’s folk credentials are firmly set in place with ‘We Tend Our Gardens’, a melodic, progressive round sung with repetitions of fiddle, melodeon and bass guitar that carries us through a green circle of life, providing runic contrast to the following track ‘Happy Alone’ which lends Block’s classic folk voice to a halting torch song of love and thwarted desire that has echoes of Marc Almond. From this darker siren, the album returns to solace, companionship and ecstasy, all found in community aligned with nature, in woodlands and riversides.
The seven and a half minute ‘Solstice In Avalon’ begins with words from Longfellow’s Prometheus, epically intoned by actor Nick Simons (known in the Faerie community as Real Deal). The poetry balloons into a stately, swelling processional held again in ever expanding space by Chandra’s drone. Accordion, hurdy gurdy, autoharp, viola and djembe evoke the mythic landscape of Glastonbury Tor while, in the woods, Faeries gather with local satyrs and sprites, burning midnight fires in lyrics penned by Dux Dido.
With Gina la Faux recruited to provide fiddle and backing vocals beneath Block’s gentle guitar plucking, ‘Harry Kellswater’ rewrites the traditional Irish ballad of its name into a same sex, green gladed seduction in a track as beautiful and understated as ‘Solstice in Avalon’ was lofty.
The album wraps with a commission for a bidder at one of the fundraising auctions held at Faerie gatherings to support those who wouldn’t be able to attend otherwise: ‘Faerie Dust and Johnny Allday’ is a guitar strumming, harmonica blowing, road movie of a tune. Its one-man band chutzpah bade us farewell from Block’s pagan tent.
Including rousing covers, such as Robb Johnson’s political classic ‘Red and Green’, in the album’s twelve tracks embeds Block’s new material in deep folk heritage. This is equally reflected in the quality of the supporting musicians Block has recruited to his songs and the seasoned professionalism of Tom Wright’s sound mixing. Although we don’t get much strictly musical innovation in this well honed craft, what we do get is a dynamic queering and inter-layering of lyric and melodic forms that provides a greater polyamorous potential for folk music and folk people.
Available by download from Bandcamp or hardcopy CD via www.marcblock.co.uk