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Phil Tyler & Sarah Hill
What We Thought Was A Lake Was A Field Of Flax

Ferric Mordant
Review by Chris Nickson

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Britain's Phil Tyler has been a quiet fixture on the folk scene for many years, emerging as an additional musician with Cordelia’s Dad when they toured Europe, then marrying and performing with their bassist, Cathy Tyler, in a duo that stripped traditional American and English songs down to their skeletons and presented them as bare, powerful things. This time around he’s working with a different singer, Sarah Hill, on a set of (mostly) traditional English music.

The layout is much the same as in the past, with Tyler on guitar, banjo, vocals, and Hill singing. Everything is spare, with voices front and center, as on the opener “Bold Fisherman,” the singing sounding glorious untutored, but with enough of a punch to deliver a knockout blow from the get-go. Rough enough to have been a first take, and maybe it was, but there’s a deathly beauty to the performance.

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“Are You Going To Leave Me,” powered along by skittering banjo, showcases Hill’s voice. It’s unaffected, and all the better for it, letting the emotions of the song shine through. This is singing without gloss or artifice, that pierces to the core.

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A couple of short instrumentals, “J B Milne” and Tyler’s own “Tarwater,” showcase his remarkable skills on his two instruments, glittering little gems strewn within the rest of the disc. Like everything else here, they’re unusual pieces, the kind of things that have stayed buried for too long.

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Perhaps the odd one out on the album is “Goldens Lads,” an original as fragile as a spider’s web, a piece that could so easily have been unearthed from the deep past. They finish with a take on the Carter Family’s “Sunnyside,” giving it a masterful touch. It fits into the continuum, and the unadorned version here makes the original seem highly decorated. It’s as raw as the rest everything, but at least closes proceedings with a glimmer of hope. The entire things is masterful.

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