Cuckoo Storm

Marry Waterson has delivered an eclectic array of duet recordings over the past decade or so, from 2011’s The Days That Shaped Me with her brother Oliver Knight, through to A Window to Other Ways with Australian singer Emily Barker. The daughter of Lal Waterson, she made her recording debut on Lal & Norma Waterson’s A True Hearted Girl in 1977. With her mother she shares an idiosyncratic sense of poetry and song, and her voice contains a good deal of Waterson DNA. Pairing with Ireland’s Adrian Crowley, whose voice and music recall the sonorities of Scott Walker or Nick Cave, Cuckoo Storm spans a range of musical zones, from the playful and idiosyncratic ‘Undear Sphere’ to the depths of Crowley’s ‘Heavy Wings’ sung plaintively by Waterson to a spare guitar and percussion backing, its lyrics drawing on the 19th-century story of ‘The unknown woman of the River Seine.’

‘Undear Sphere’, which opens the album, was composed using her ‘blackout’ technique, whereby she blacks out lyrics so that only certain words or phrases remain, to spur in-the-moment creation of new work. Their duets are often spoken word threaded into song, as on the lyrically freeform ‘Lucky Duck for Grown Ups’. Produced by Portishead’s Jim Barr, it’s peculiarly haunting.