Eliza Carthy
This short album really does stand as a showcase for her singing, and it’s something quite remarkable at times. Her take on Richard Thompson’s “The Great Valerio,” for instance, pulls the song in a different direction to the original. It’s intimate, every breath closing, heart in the throat with each second. No shying away, no studio trickery; she takes you with her to watch someone negotiating the tightrope of the circus and life.
Likewise, her version of “New York Trader” stands far apart from the treatment that Lankum gave it on their last album. There’s none of the psychedelic crashes and waves of the Irish band; this one keeps a close sense of physical danger and death that raises goose pimples.
“May Morning” is one of the songs where she pulls out the violin, its tone rich and woody, forming a counterpoint to her singing, weaving its own tapestry so it becomes a piece that needs several hearings to unravel all it contains.
Carthy closes No Wasted Joy with the night-visiting song, “The Grey Cock,” that she sang fully 30 years ago on the first Waterson: Cathy album. Here, the weight of time and all its sorrows colour everything. There’s passion, experience, a voice with delicious cracks and creaks. Quite simply, she knows more now that the young woman who first sang it. She’s seen the world, carried her baggage, and seen the ghosts. It’s a magnificent end to a superb disc that shows less truly can be more.
Further listening and reading:
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There’s no doubt that Eliza Cathy has folk music in her DNA; after all, her parents are Martin Carthy and the late, much-missed Norma Waterson. But that background alone was no guarantee that she’d turn into the towering, adventurous musician she’s become, constantly pushing at ideas, or on No Wasted Joy, stripping everything all the way back to simply voice and (on a couple of tracks) fiddle. The result is a stark, wondrous window into her talents – and she opens with the powerful “I Wish, I Wish,” where the longing and regret mingling in her voice are both raw and painful.
