Description

Limited 180gm white vinyl.

8/10 from Loud & Quiet Clapper Is Still might be one of the most intelligent contemporary folk records youll hear all year. And there are serious tunes too, pastoral punk racket, whimsical rounds and the blinding Henrys Son , which could be a lost Smiths classic. Its a unique endeavour towards a new folk sound, full of ragged audioscapes

Way Through are Claire Titley and Christopher Tipton, a pastoral punk duo originally from Shropshire, now residing in London. Informed by the field as much as the flyover, Way Through write songs which phase in and out with guitar, tapes, damaged drums and vocals. Using wrong-footed repetition, rapid interplay and free-looping happenstance the band create a ragged yet intuitive tapestry of sound.

Way Throughs critically received debut, Arrow Shower was released on Upset The Rhythm in 2011, its songs walked the streets of market towns and focussed on how personal experience affects our perception of a shared landscape, haunted by inward territories. They then followed up their album with a deep map of East Londons Bethnal Green, captured in text, photographs and music, which WIRE described in an interview with the band as a guided walk through the mythologised outposts of ordinariness a project rich in topographical lore. The Quietus added that Way Through document and create another version of place that somehow seeps into the space between reality and urban fantasy.

Last year saw an immersive cassette album, entitled Enclosure released by Comfortable On A Tightrope. After which Way Through were invited by Resonance FM to work on a processional piece of music that saw them navigating Tate Britain channelling songs. Throughout this time the band became increasingly interested in submerging their work fully in the places they found potent. Spending most of the year conducting field research, travelling about the country, taking field recordings, they gathered their thoughts, notes and songs straight from their source. This has resulted in their new album Clapper Is Still, an itinerant album of thirteen songs located in the particular places each was written.

Clapper Is Still is a bold record, concerned with the vast array of elegiac components Way Through have discovered locked within the English landscape. It peers into the overlapping histories that persist in these places and tries to reconcile how they are experienced together. Stoke Poges is a fizzing pool of pitched keyboards, and faltering samples, trapping a vocal focussed on the natures ability to quietly regenerate alongside the evolving stories of this famed parish. Imber & Tyneham compares and contrasts two villages taken over and claimed by the MOD during WWII, one still actively used by the military for combat training on the Salisbury Plain, the other fast becoming a preserved time capsule in rural Dorset trapped throughout most of the year in a live firing zone. The song is a heady rush of staccato guitar and snare rattle, full of unexploded debris, corrugated rooftops and halted firing as Tipton calls out.

Westonzoyland and Eyam both see Titley pick up the vocal narrative. The former song detailing a journey across a Civil War battlefield, the latter a walk around the Derbyshire plague village of Eyam.

Westonzoyland reels across time, imagining the battle raging amongst the 70s bungalows, chain-link fencing and pedestrian chicanes. A wash of violin skips across the track whilst Titley seeks parallels between a felt-tip memorial poster for a local teenager to the stone ediface commemorating the dead in the nearby fallow field. Eyam spins through cycles of swelling ambience and reverbed recordings, allowing Titleys vocal to take a morbid journey past the doomed cottages of self-sacrifice. Heritage stasis remains she insists as a field recording of a stooping display hawk envelops her. As well as their frequent use of field recordings to embellish their songs, Way Through also rely on found text to hang their songs on, like with the broken gravestones of Yorkshires deserted Wharram Percy or the graffiti scrawled across the vandalised info-board on Whiteleaf Hill, a place where bike tyre tracks leap across barrows, and where a colossal hillside chalk cross draws you towards the steep abandonment of meaning.

Sipson makes for a modern day comparison point, threatened with Heathrows impending third runway, becoming a virtual ghost town of bursting ragweed and daubed black letters on makeshift banners betraying a sad suburban echo. Roughting Linn is decidedly motoric for Way Through, the guitar clings to its repeated chord for dear life whilst the drums tumble relentlessly onwards, eventually the song mimics its subject, getting stuck in a galloping groove which dissolves slowly into the distance. Roughting Linn is an outcrop of rock in Northumberland thats carved all over in prehistoric patterns, mysterious and very much unknowable, off the map and withdrawn. Paths leading everywhere in hope of finding, No more signs, no more markings sings Tipton anticipating the compass of the record itself.

Clapper Is Still is an album that traces the melancholic margins of our landscape. It attempts to document the remains of something leaving, the fog in the air, the flash ahead thunder, the shadows striping the late afternoon. Way Through seek out places and songs with repeating customs, paths to memory, joining the dots between fading locations and their deteriorating histories. Can this land remember? Listen to the voice, thats no longer here they command towards the end of the record. Clapper Is Still follows an outline of a memory, following a sketched skeleton to where something happened, where something once marked the land and left something indelible.