Lakeman’s latest rousing, compelling reminder that sometimes folk-rock – it just rocks.
At 13 solo albums and counting and with a career stretching back to the early 1990s, certain things can be taken for granted about West Devon folk musician Seth Lakeman’s latest release, ‘The Granite Way’. By this point anything other than reliably robust folk-rock based on some stunning musicianship from Lakeman would be a major surprise, and each of the 10 tracks duly lives up to expectations of crystalline production and dynamic, finely crafted orchestration that switches mood and pace with utmost confidence and power. Put simply, no matter how soaked and steeped in West Country mist and rain (and folklore and history and music) it may be out there on ‘The Granite Way’, Lakeman just doesn’t seem capable of putting a foot wrong.
However if some previous albums were based around a specific subject or historical theme like ‘A Pilgrim’s Tale’ (2020, Cooking Vinyl), which describes the voyage of The Mayflower to North America in 1620, as the title suggests, ‘The Granite Way’ is almost all based on real-life places, events and folklore from his region. Lakeman darts from the well-known history (in the South-West at least) of the Lynmouth lifeboat that was hauled overland on the North Devon coast in 1899 on ‘Louisa‘, to the 1844 murder on Bodmin Moor of Charlotte Dymond – on the song of the same name. Equally, ‘The Huntsman and the Moon’ provides an appropriately eerie account of the legend of Old Crockern, the Huntsman Devil of Dartmoor while ‘Born to the Strain’ offers a stinging, heartfelt account of the collapse of the fishing industry, tin mine and shipyard closures that knocked out much of what little industry Cornwall and West Devon used to have. Given the damage those job losses still cause today, it’s perhaps the most powerful of the entire album.
“Born to the steel, born to the strain
Born to a hurt that you’ll never know
Born to the work born to the pain
Born to a life that you’ll never know”
It’s true that any room for improvisation is very much woven and perhaps a little restrained by the 10 tracks’ very traditional-sounding and structured formats. But for all its serious core, the album crackles with way too much energy and life to risk being stuffy or lacking in immediacy – which, given the very historic nature of most of the lyrics, too, is arguably even more of an achievement.
You could argue, anyway, that that kind of reverence for the longstanding traditions of folk music this album shows forms part and parcel of the working philosophies of some of the greats of British folkrock, like early Fairport Convention. So if Lakeman was already getting close to their output in his previous work, and for all the right reasons, his getting on ‘The Granite Way’ doesn’t seem to have slowed down his momentum in that direction in the slightest.
