The Bookshop Band 2024
Emerge, Return
Curated and abetted by the “Lifehouse” architect, enchanting chamber folk from two charming indoor characters.
To lesser mortals having Pete Townshend as a producer could be a major selling point and a blessing in no disguise, and it’s not exactly par for the course for this Bath-born ensemble – yet Ben Please and Beth Porter see the legendary artist’s involvement in “Emerge, Return” as a fresh validation of their niche creativity which values the written word as much as the phrase performed as part of a musical piece. Fresh – because bewitching literary salons of the sort the duo’s name used to suggest and eliciting rapturous response from such authors as Margaret Atwood, one of those whose books inspired the couple’s songs, and Ian Rankin, is not the same as spellbinding one of British rock’s main proponents.
Nothing of this should be but of tangential importance to the audiences who still spin the lyrical likes of "Leaves" and must derive immense pleasure from the hilariously autobiographical “The Night We Came To Wigtown (Scotland’s Famous Book Town)” which documents B’n’B’s first trip to the titular locale where their little family now reside. Getting there – in terms of compositions’ drift, rather than geography – will require quite an adventurous journey through variously paced, albeit equally riveting, cuts. The first step of the voyage is most vital: it’s “Sanctuary” which taps into the world of Lyra Belacqua – together with the haunting “Room For Three” waltzing in later on – and lifts the album’s veil of fragile silvery strum and a gusty, gutsy cello to reveal the pair’s vocal weave and another meta-level, highlighted once synthesizer’s waves bring forth the “pulled” syllable to allude to Philip Pullman’s last name. However, while “Dirty Word” welcomes the punters to “Brave New World” via chamber soundscape with an alien groove, “Eve In Your Garden” introduces mesmeric traditional balladry to the record’s flow.
Initially dry in a retro, Jansch-and-Renbourne manner, Porter-and-Please’s numbers that are being slightly and slily fueled by Townshend’s acoustic strings gradually increase the degree of their feelings to reach its apogee with the deeply resonant and delicately percussive “Faith In Weather” which dissolves in wondrous a cappella before allowing “Deep Time” to seethe in crystalline, if somewhat histrionic, vulnerability. Yet just when “Doll” seems to take the emotional thermometer a few notches down from the boiling point, towards vaudevillian playfulness, Pete’s serrated electric riffs make a sparse appearance, letting the ensemble’s stew simmer and keeping the listener arrested in their tracks. And though the translucent “Waggons And Wheels” simply helps the album roll along cinematic ruts, and “The Pull Of The Moors” maps a route to the Brontë sisters imagery, “Why I Travel This Way” offers the glockenspiel-sprinkled polyphony as the raison d’être of the band’s perpetual movement, and “The Vanishing Hours” sculpts a life-affirming hymn out of a funereal finale.
“Leave a mark to tell my children’s children’s child,” goes one of the duo’s dozen serenades: and this platter has done exactly that. “Emerge, Return” is a masterpiece and a milestone in the little ensemble’s story of travels into the letters and beyond.
*****
