The Sprigs, Rory Salter's fantastically wholesome project conceptually framed around the Winds in the Willows universe, make a first time vinyl appearance via the consistently unpredictable Bison imprint (home also to Still House Plants, Urs Graf Consort, Cowboy Builder et al, who all sound very much nothing alike). Your interest in For Red Riverbank may very well hinge on your feelings for Mole, Ratty and Badger (twee? Lovable? Impossibly wistful? You decide), though as a self-confessed advocate for the pastoral hijinx of those critters I was personally ever going to fall on one side of the fence here. Much of Salter's other work is situated in the world of noise/sound art/improv, which makes his efforts here all the more mercurial, interpolating his experimental instincts into a kind of uncanny DIY folk that's at once both melodically naive (or should that be childlike?) and intentionally phantasmagorical, conjuring its own parallel world of simple wonder. There's more than a little crossover with the Spillage Fete crew's slightly cracked world of wonky charm and lo-fi lysergic elegies of Eyes of the Amaryllis (indeed, I could easily have once easily seen this record released by Horn of Plenty), though its perhaps to a group like Blod the project bears closest comparison, that same ability to manipulate folk formations into rich and vivid new vistas. Beautiful stuff no doubt, but equally led by an unconventional mind.
FFO: Blod, A Happy Return, Eyes of the Amaryllis , Bons
