A Thousand Pokes

‘Pokes’ were typos to 14th-century scribes, and it's the rough music of a mistaken world, poked through with holes, that's evoked in Stick in the Wheel's fourth studio set. Musically, lyrically and sonically, it's as adventurous and as potent as their award-winning previous, pairing pared-back acoustic folk song with angular guitar-driven beats and sheets of industrial electronica, evoking the tension of forces in huge machines of uncertain purpose. Stick is a band that like to reach out. Parallel to their three studio albums – 2015's From Here, which won them the fRoots Album of the Year and Mojo Folk Album of the Year; 2018's Follow Them True, which explored ritual and cycle and included a version of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance; and 2020's Hold Fast – their numerous side projects encompass 2017's English Folk Field Recordings, a project that featured raw performances from the likes of Martin Carthy and Lisa Knapp, and the sonic deep dive into London history that was their collage-cut up-sound tapestry on 2021's Tonebeds for Poetry. Pokes employs and extends some of that sonic collage, beginning with the opener, ‘Crystal Tears’, a version of ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ based on Nina Simone's ‘In My Prime’. Recorded at Snape Maltings on a 2023 Britten Pears arts residency, using equipment from a studio at Rendlesham Air Base (itself famed for a notorious 1980 UFO case), it's a powerful opening statement, drenched in dronetastic layers of distortion and distemper, even over the lead vocal. ‘Back of the Hatch’ could be rammed home at Hyde Park Corner, while the rock riff of the title-track has a flair like gunpowder. ‘Burnt Walk’ has the kind of propulsive, explosive riff and rhythm that typifies the pent-up energy that singer Nicola Kearey and guitarist and producer Ian Carter, the duo behind Stick in the Wheel, bring to their music, while ‘Lavender’ delicately but precisely draws the veil back on one of London's oldest street cries. Sonic layering aside, the album highlight may well be the exceedingly spare voice and guitar performance of ‘Watercress-o’, a song about the General Strike by Roger Watson. As mentioned in the album notes, this lament about communities and the power of a union, based on Watson's grandmother‘s memory of the 1926 General Strike ‘feels as old as the hills, and every bit as pertinent now as the hundred-year-old event. Always tragically relevant.’ To follow, ‘Hush’ draws a net of dobro and guitar over an unusually relentless ‘rock-a-bye-baby’ lullaby that may inspire sleepless nights. Brace, though, for closing, seven-minute ‘Steals the Thief’, where the atonal and dronal combine with psych guitars and a séance of drums, Kearey's hard-tune vocals, unsettled keys and what sounds like exactly the kind of wind you don't want at your back. And then it lets go. Time to dance the Poke.