CD Odyssey Disc 1174: Johnny Flynn

I hope you will forgive my brevity, dear reader, for I am not well. I have some kind of throat infection robbing me of my vitality. I’d hoped to go to the clinic today but apparently showing up at a clinic at 1:45 is too late in the day in these troubled times. Argh. I went back to work instead, which I’m almost certain is not the correct treatment for whatever I have.

Anyway, I may try again tomorrow but for now let’s see if I can get through a music review. Aah, writing…my mental pilot light. May it always be the last faculty to fail me.

Disc 1174 is… A Larum

Artist: Johnny Flynn

Year of Release: 2008

What’s up with the Cover? A figure crosses a snowy field in front of what looks like some old and abandoned passenger cars of some kind. Is it just me or does the figure’s head kind of look like it’s part of the painting on the passenger car? Weird…

How I Came To Know It: This was on my oft-referenced “Best 100 Indie Folk Albums” from Paste Magazine. “A Larum” came in at #85 and left an impression.

Then it became impossible to find. I bought Flynn’s 2017 release “Sillion” (reviewed back at Disc 1136) as a consolation prize but still couldn’t find the now out of print “A Larum”. Finally, a couple years later my persistent searching paid off when a used copy showed up in local record store “Ditch”.

How It Stacks Up:  I have two Johnny Flynn albums and I saved top spot for this one but now that I’m here I must admit…I prefer Sillion. That puts “A Larum” into second.

Ratings: 3 stars

Not to be confused with sixties rocker Johnny Kidd and the Pirates – as my wife is wont to playfully do – Johnny Flynn is a South African/English indie folk singer. I have an unfounded suspicion that he is a critical darling although you wouldn’t know it from his lack of commercial success (“A Larum” is one of three albums he’s charted with, coming in at a less than vaunted #98).

Not that charting ever mattered to great music. If it did, you could take over half my collection and turf it into the sea. Don’t do that though – it would be environmentally irresponsible. Also, I like my uncharted gems. Maybe they shine only for me, but it makes the shine that much more lustrous. But I digress…

How does “A Larum” hold up in the Land of Uncharted Gems? Not bad.

Flynn has a sing-songy style that makes you feel like you could encounter him walking down some backwoods English path where he sings to birds and birch trees. He isn’t a vocal powerhouse, but he knows how to match that sing-song style to sparse and whimsical arrangements. The guitar playing is light on strum, heavy on fancy picking, and takes a back seat to the stories that Flynn trills out.

Unfortunately, despite listening to this album four times sequentially over the last four days I often find my mind wandering when I listen. I catch snippets of evocative images like these from “Sally”:

“I’m a plow and you’re a furrow

I’m a fox and you’re a burrow”

Or this from “The Wrote & the Writ”:

“What of all those wayward priests?
The ones who like to drink
Do you suppose they'd swap their blood for wine
Like you swapped yours for ink, for ink.”

When I read the lyrics back online it all makes sense and there are even larger stories within, but there is something in Johnny Flynn’s voice that makes it hard to focus on the developing plot. Instead, like the songs, you trip along like a butterfly to the next flower. It is pleasant, but it didn’t have the emotional gravitas I like in my folk music.

The one exception is “Tunnels” another whimsical hand-picked number about how we are all damaged, trying to repair the holes in our lives even as we dig new ones in the process. The song jumps and skips, but the darkness at the core remains strong. I kind of welcomed that darkness, but maybe that’s just the fevered cough talking.

Anyway, I’d ask this record to slow down and take itself more seriously, but Flynn has obviously decided to do serious at a gallop, and who am I to tell him different. This is good stuff that challenges you to pay close attention and rewards you if you do. At least I assume it would.

Now food and a blanket.

Best tracks: The Wrote & the Writ, Sally, Tunnels

CD Odyssey Disc 1136: Johnny Flynn

On my last review I was hankering for some new music (I am insatiable in this regard) and so Sunday found me downtown buying a few albums. Three of them are new releases: Frank Turner’s “Be More Kind,” Janelle Monae’s “Dirty Computer,” and Eleanor Friedberger’s “Rebound.” I also got my one remaining album from the “Best of 1978” records I’ve been searching for with the purchase of Devo’s “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!”

At some point we’ll return to all these records, when the dice gods decide it is time. Let’s see what they chose for me now…

Disc 1136 is… Sillion

Artist: Johnny Flynn

Year of Release: 2017

What’s up with the Cover? I have no idea. Is that some broken piece of statuary? A crude stone carving of a cat or maybe a turtle?

How I Came To Know It: I was in the record store searching for Johnny Flynn’s 2008 album “A Larum” but saw this one instead. I was keen to have some Johnny Flynn in my collection so I threw caution to the wind and bought “Sillion” without ever having heard a song off of it.

How It Stacks Up:  I have recently been able to find “A Larum” (it wasn’t easy) and now have two Johnny Flynn albums. Of the two I’ll put “Sillion” in second place.

Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4

Johnny Flynn is a South African born, English folk singer with a timeless delivery that would be equally at home in 1518 as 2018. “Sillion” is his fifth studio album and shows that a decade into his weird and wonderful career, he is still pushing the envelope of the traditional forms of folk music.

I had to look it up, but the definition of “Sillion” is “the thick, voluminous, and shiny soil turned over by a plow.” It is an evocative image and one well suited to Johnny Flynn’s fifth album, which is a mix of musical forms so old they feel like primordial truths, newly discovered through Flynn’s artistry.

Flynn goes on about this image for some time in the album liner notes, but the presentation feels a bit forced and affected. Fortunately the music is anything but, digging fearlessly into some kind of fey and dreamlike truth that you can’t fully grasp but somehow feels full of wisdom.

These tracks are more mood pieces than narratives, with a haunted quality that draws you in and raises the hairs on your arms. It feels like you have stumbled through the woods and come upon a troupe of Gaelic spirits sitting up late in an abandoned and crumbling cathedral, trading songs until they are dispelled by the dawn.

The opening track is as ghostly as it gets. “Raising the Dead” starts with a deep echo and the faint ringing of bells, and then Flynn’s high lilt tells the tale of the ghosts of dead relatives returning to haunt your home. It is a little eerie, but it isn’t frightening. This is a celebration of memory and the guidance we get from those who come before long after they are gone. Whether it is just memory, or whether Flynn imagines the dead actually returning to inspire us is deliciously unclear.

“Sillion” stays at this murky edge of our conscious and unconscious minds. On “Wandering Aengus” he sings:

“People talk of rain, now for the pain

Now in the swing of all the people at the gate

Call of men-folks down in the woods, bow down to Cyprus

In the hazel wood and wave

For the song, for the song of Wandering Aengus”

Who is this Wandering Aengus? Is he man or faery? It doesn’t matter. The song inspires you with the carefree joy of a walk in the woods. You might lose yourself there for a while and see strange sights out of the corner of your eye, but no serious harm will befall you.

I was never fully sure what songs were about, but they would always fill me with restless energy. Flynn goes deep into primordial rhythms and gets your heart fluttering in new and wonderful ways. For the most part, he does this with traditionally Irish structures, but he is not afraid to explore pop or jazz elements if they serve to keep you attuned to the magic and the mystery.

The production is light on bass, which help keep Flynn’s vocals from being overpowered. It can be a bit too tinny here and there, but for the most part it works with the songs well. The notable exception is “Heart Sunk Hank” which is partially recorded on an old-time Voice-o-Graph machine. I don’t know what the fascination is with these things lately (Neil Young did a whole album on one for “A Letter Home” (reviewed very negatively at Disc 850), but it needs to stop. They were a nifty novelty in 1945, but the sound quality was crap then, and it’s crap now.

This is the exception, however. For the rest of the record it has an old school quality to the sound, but not to the point where it sacrifices quality. And besides, nothing can steal the dreamy magic of “Sillion” away for long. Flynn’s lilting vocals clamber about these songs with a restless and elfin quality that makes you nervous he’s a changeling and if you listen too long he’s going to steal you away to faerie land forever. At least the music will be good.

Best tracks: Raising the Dead, Wandering Aengus, Barleycorn, In the Deepest, The Landlord