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Tony Wakeford is of course best known for his seminal neo-folk band Sol Invictus, but he’s also released a number of albums under his own name, including La Croix, Cupid & Death, the live album Paris, and most recently, this 2007 release, on which he’s joined by a number of guest musicians, namely vocalist Kris Force of Amber Asylum and Grey Force Wakeford, percussionist M (a.k.a. Reeve Malka) and flautist Guy Harries of Orchestra Noir, and bassist Caroline Jago, vocalist Andrew King and violinist Renée Rosen of Sol Invictus. Tony Wakeford provided this description of Into The Woods at the time of its creation: For me it’s a very English album reflecting my childhood and youth. It’s a strange England populated by out of work hangmen, dubious priests and the Woman's Institute. A countryside becoming suburban with pockets of woodland surviving between substandard housing development for the proletariat. Pockets of woodland that seem bent on revenge and that it’s best to keep away from. So take my hand, gentle reader, and we shall venture into the woods to see what’s there… Be careful not to stray from the path into the shady undergrowth on either side. Into The Woods contains 12 tracks, totalling 43 minutes. After the brief vocal prelude ‘The Woods’, ‘A Saint In Roseland’ combines dense looped electronica, a harpsichord-like keyboard line, orchestral brass and multi-layered male and female vocals. ‘Lightning Strikes’ maintains this lush orchestral sound, with treated vocals, piano and pizzicato violin. In fact, there has hardly been any guitar on the album by this point, just a gentle intro to this song which is swiftly overwhelmed by the dense layers of orchestration. ‘In The Woods’, however, blends acoustic guitar and flute with spectral female vocals to great effect, sounding something like last year’s Triple Tree album Ghosts. The title track ‘Into The Woods’ builds from a flute intro into a dark folk song, much more in the style of Sol Invictus, with the main guitar melody bolstered with keyboards, choral vocals, tambourine and orchestral backing. There’s a Dionysian, psychedelic folk feel to the instrumental middle section.
‘A Small Town In Germany’, which follows, is one of the album’s highlights. Opening with a crackling German radio dialogue sample and strummed coustic guitar, the song forms a subtly disconcerting narrative of the cruel and turbulent history lurking beneath the superficially placid and orderly surface of small-town Germany. It would be interesting to hear a Sol Invictus version of this song at some point. This is followed by another very strong song, ‘Down The Road Slowly’. A version of this song, credited to Sol Invictus, appears on the 2006 split release A Mythological Prospect Of The Citie Of Londinium, and ‘Down The Road Slowly’ is the most explicit articulation of the ideas outlined in Tony Wakeford’s description of this album. Bloody English folklore, lynch-mob mentality, and vignettes of barely-suppressed suburban violence coalesce in a darkly comic vision of Albion – ‘England is funny but sometimes she scares me’. Highly distorted vocals, some courtesy of Andrew King, lend this track an industrial edge as a counterfoil to Guy Harries’ delicate flute playing. Interestingly, the lyrics printed in the booklet vary from what you actually hear on the album, suggesting that these lyrics have been worked and reworked.
‘The London Hanged’ is certainly the most folk-sounding track on Into The Woods, an a cappella ballad sung over a low background of textured ambient drones, in some ways reminiscent of Andrew King’s solo album like The Amfortas Wound. There are no songwriting credits on the album, and I don’t know whether this song is genuinely traditional, but it sounds very much like it could be, packed as it is with references to London geography – St Giles, Tyburn, Seven Dials and Ludgate. ‘The Hangman's Son’ also uses more drones, mingled with guitar, tambourine and multi-layered vocals. ‘Take The Steps’ features melancholy flute and orchestral strings, punctuated by sharp chimes. ‘The Devil Went A' Travelling’ is slow and sombre, with hollow snare-drum rolls keeping a mordant beat beneath sparse strummed guitar and heavily reverbed vocals, including some from Andrew King. The album closes with ‘If You Go Down To The...’, a reprise of ‘Into The Woods’, mostly arranged for guitar and voice only. Overall, Into The Woods has a much denser, more processed sound than most Sol Invictus albums, using a lot of orchestration and electronics and not so reliant on guitar, although of course albums like The Blade, In A Garden Green and Thrones made some use of electronic loops and drones. With Sol Invictus, however, these tend to be used as openings or interludes in what are basically guitar songs – on Into The Woods, they take precedence over the guitar. Tony Wakeford has stated that Into The Woods pays homage to the 70s prog rock he listened to in his youth, but this prog influence isn’t very readily apparent to me. What the album does bear some resemblance to, however, is mid-period Death In June albums like The World That Summer, Brown Book and The Wall Of Sacrifice. It offers a compelling and coherent vision, but it could have done with one or two lighter moments – it’s an overwhelmingly dark and morose album. Into The Woods comes in a digipack sleeve with a full lyric booklet, and special mention must be made of the fantastic cover art of a darkly looming woodland, a painting entitled A Path Of Dark Trust by Richard Moult, whose website address is given below. As the Stephen Sondheim musical of the same name puts it: Into the woods,
It's time to go,
I hate to leave,
I have to, though.
Into the woods –
It's time, and so
I must begin my journey. www.tursa.com www.myspace.com/tursa www.gazetree.com
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