Wasteland

There’s no contemporary singer quite like Jim Ghedi. In his otherworldly voice, with its underlay of drone mechanics, I hear trace elements of John Jacob Niles, a Banshee’s spectral cry and a sharp wind through the crannies of an old house in the middle of nowhere. A touch of the Irish Traveller way of singing too, as with the sean nós ornamentation you hear in Thomas McCarthy’s music. Then there is his six- and 12-string guitar work, the reverberating synth and fiddle drones, all sympathetic parts moving in tandem with the weight and shape of his voice. On the title-track that guitar is set out raw and unadorned, before strings and electronica weigh in with their own spheres of influence, expanding to a saturated sense of epic finish, the kind Scott Walker might have dreamt of in his sleep. Like many of the songs here, it feels epic in form, even if there’s no song on Wasteland that’s longer than six minutes. The band around him includes two fiddles, drums and bass, electronics, and the voices of Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada and Ruth Clinton from Landless.

Wasteland opens with Ghedi in high falsetto on ‘Old Stones’, a song and lyric redolent of some daunting folk horror fever dream, the swaying, soaring melody line circling around the vocal like some unquiet, subliminal force. The following ‘What Will Become of England’ was first issued back in 2022, with a deliciously creepy video attached. It’s a song Peter Kennedy collected from singer Harry Cox, who heard it from a fellow in a pub who used to play the tin whistle, and it had nine verses, but Cox remembered just the two. It’s those two stark verses that Ghedi summons up to sing here, and it’s an unflinching, unadorned state-of-the-nation song that, sadly, does not seem to feel dated or old. And while instrumental pieces like ‘Newtondale / John Blue’ offer relief, there’s something that feels feverish in them too, an unnatural heat in their topsoil, crowned by a ring of vision-making liberty caps. There’s more of a grunge spirit at work on ‘Sheaf & Feld’, while ‘Wishing Tree’ stretches beyond the epic into some spectral cosmic space. To close, it’s Ewan MacColl’s ‘Trafford Road Ballad’ on voice and solo guitar that brings us back down to earth and tarmac. You feel you’ve travelled far out. You’re unlikely to experience a more intense trip of an album this year.