Cassette
The Sprigs is Malvern Brume's Rory Salter, a project of his which may or may not have come to your attention last year when Before I Glare Up At the Sun Through the Top Soil was first issued as an eight song CDr on his own Infant Tree imprint. Here's that collection again in cassette format with an additional four songs, all taken from that same period and replete with new, impossibly lovely Wind in the Willows artwork. The first thing to say about all that is just how perfectly suited the imagery is to housing the sounds contained within. There's something both wholesome and a little mischievous about Toad and his crew which speaks perfectly to Salter's debased folk manipulations. This is often very pretty, emotive music, though it's also rendered wonky and somewhat uncanny, too. The arrangements are mostly guitar-based, skeletal and simply recorded, though they follow unconventional structures and tunings, each track it's own odd digression on a wandering path through woodlands where everything is not quite as it seems. Comparisons to Enhet For Fri Musik and the recent Nein Rodere and Eyes of the Amaryllis LPs hold some water, though the type of odd-hewn pastoralism The Sprigs trade in feels so distinctly old time English - there's just as much Peter Rabbit and Richard Adams in here, too - the whole things feels a bit like a one-off. Well, it had better not be, i want a lot more of this, cheers.
