The regular agenda in the side-room music space Stables 2 is that the named act will appear alone, and do two sets of around 45 minutes each. The arrangement of the room is a measure of the ticket sales – small cabaret style tables make for a cozy intimate gig whilst larger numbers get the rows of seats treatment, and this was very much a rows of seats gig for Charm of Finches, the Australian duo of Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes. Having previously seen Charm of Finches at the mostly standing and frequently noisy at the back bar, at Lexington in London this was both a quieter set-up and, it’s fair to say, a slightly older audience.
Having been played on by the distinctive sounds of Bonny Light Horseman, Charm of Finches – Mabel on guitar and Ivy predominantly on keyboards with the occasional excursion on fiddle – launched the evening with their own very distinctive opening track from their last album Marlinchen In The Snow. The strongly percussive Cleancut is a song about making the decision to sever all remaining ties in a relationship that is going nowhere. Sticking with the same album, the capturing the ennui linked to constantly touring of Temporary Home also came with the news that after a few years of doing so Charm of Finches had decided to not take a four month European excursion this year – instead they’ve relocated to Glasgow for the year.
Treading Water, with Ivy on fiddle, was a slow ballad which continued the trend of recognising that love was not going anywhere, it’s more gentle and wistful in mood but although it reflects on good times it’s smart enough to recognise that what was keeping the relationship going was “fear of losing, fear of breaking / it took a while for that feeling to go / We both knew we were just treading water / eventually drowned each other.” Gentle, but brutally honest. Leave It All Behind is another song that trades comparisons of the benefits of the “wanderer’s life” against the joys of the fixed point life – a life with a home. It is, Mabel explained, as much about the beauty of the Australian landscape and the sadness of constantly leaving it behind, as the leaving behind of people and actual dwellings. With echoey finger-picked guitar it takes on a drifting dreamy beauty.
A new song, I Did My Best, was inspired, Mabel shared, by Ivy’s habit of picking men who are “a bit suss” although Ivy noted that it was “mostly fictional.” With the duo’s most recent release being a single rather than a full new album (there is one on the way this year though), this has become the Meteor tour – it’s a song that blends together those themes of love slipping away, but was also inspired by the landscapes of New Zealand.
After a short break the second half included more signature tunes from the last album, with the title track jovially introduced, but Marlinchen In The Snow is literally a Grimm tale – a story the sisters were introduced to at a young age which includes death, murder and just a touch of involuntary cannibalism. And yet it’s delicate and hauntingly beautiful – a touch that Charm of Finches bring to their music on more than one occasion. Their take on Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers is folkier, but still as striking in its condemnation of the perils of casual, careless, militarism. And what a song Human is, taking on a certain tainted strand of modern masculinity with the sisters decrying threatening words, threatening deeds and pointing out that “It’s not my job to teach you how to be a human, man.”
Charm of Finches are thought provoking, musically and lyrically intriguing and as funny as necessary in their between song banter to keep an evening acceptably light enough whilst they trace byways of broken love, untrustworthy partners and friends, the two sides of the troubadour’s life and, of course, gruesome death and pain. These may be typical folk themes, but these paths that Charm of Finches follow are not just the usual ones, and that adds the layer of distinctiveness that makes them so worthy of attention.
