Across the Field

Across the Field has an appealingly ramshackle, rough-edged, home-made quality across its seven tracks. There is a refreshingly quirky and eccentric spontaneity to these traditional songs from the US and UK. House and Land are an inventive North Carolina-based duo of multi-instrumentalists, Sarah Louise and Sally Anne Morgan, and Across the Field captures the sound of like-minded musicians trying out different things on well-worn instruments. Their version of ‘The Blacksmith’, the lament of a girl betrayed known to many from Vaughan Williams & Bert Lloyd's Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, features trippy glockenspiel and tin whistle riffs atop a mesmeric squeezebox drone, although it never quite tips over into the intense retro spook-folk that it deserves.

The album is, it must be said, a little hit and miss. The pair's singing voices sometimes sound a trifle affected, erring on the side of an over-earnest stridency or an atmospheric waftiness. And there are some passages of sustained instrumental noodling that doesn't really go anywhere. The most effective tracks are where the duo's combined string instruments jangle sympathetically in a homespun wall of sound that favourably sets off their singing voices, framing them in an American old-time context. The opener, ‘Two Sisters,’ pairs banjo with simple but mesmeric electric guitar. Similarly, ‘Precious Jewels’ blends banjo with, by the sounds of it, dulcimer to achieve a crystalline quality. On these tracks the duo sound like the wayward heirs of an American tradition that encompasses the likes of Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard or Sarah Ogan Gunning.