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The Devil's Doorbells
Pushing It (EP)
[Image]"Oh is it happening?" says a voice, just before a hootenanny version of Doc Watson's "Roll In” gets underway. It builds up a head head of steam. The singer sings "rollin' in my sweet babies arms" and the group call "sweet babies arms!" back at him. I swear someone shouts out "yee haw!" at one point. You can practically smell the campfire.
There's a lot of folk music in Sidmouth in August. You can't walk along the esplanade without a man with a guitar singing Streets of London at you. A busking outfit has to be a bit special to grab your attention as you rush between gigs. The Devils Doorbell had bagged the prestigious spot outside the public toilets and they had that quality which always stops me dead in my tracks. Authenticity. Reader, I bought the album.
Half the disc is made up of the folkiest of folkie crowd pleasers, possibly constructed to appeal to my personal comfort zone. The venerable Bella Ciao starts out with a breathy vocal lilt but rapidly turns into a singalong with a fiddle interlude that oozes pure Italiana. (Firepit Collective make this song a shouty student political rallying cry but here it's a wipe-a-tear-away lament.)
St Francis of Assisi replaces Franklin Roosevelt in a version of Only Passin' Thru which is definitely more Peter Seeger than Leonard Cohen. ("These birds fill the air with song/ they're not here for very long"). By comparison, Byker Hill is restrained, not to say lugubrious and a suitably mournful St James Infirmary is largely allowed to speak for itself.
So far so folky. I imagine this is the sort of thing which attracts many pennies into a guitar case. But the other half of the album is given over to what I take to be self-written songs. And while the sawing blue grass fiddle and old time choruses are still very much in evidence there's an uncompromising punk sensibility to the lyrics.
Track 2 Pisshead Bill has foot-tappin' melody which I can't get out of my head; paired with a set of lyrics which drip with nihilsm. ("Your fear of losing everything has lost you everything now everything you ever loved is gone"). The narrative could be compared, not unfavorably, with some of Chris Wood's recent-ish work -- a stream of observation about hard-luck cases and ordinary people
his father only pugilizes ones of diminutive sizes violence is the best disguise to hide from the fear you lock inside
Glass Houses is a curious celebration of never doing the washing up ("I'm a dog that roles in its own it's shit, and I reckon I'm the happier for it"). Petri Dish flirts with cynicism but allows itself a brief flash of hope at the end; all set to a whimsical tune which made me think of Robin Williamson's funny little hedgehog.
Wouldn't it be nice to finally realize that this life is best led taking risks because no matter what we do our significance is equal to an amoeba in a petri dish
"I need to do that one again" says the voice at the end of Roll In. "It went a bit wrong". Well, maybe it did. But that's all part of the fun on this kind of album. “Recorded in fields, car parks and around campfires" says the back of the CD and I believe it. Folk music may sometimes get more polished than this but it rarely gets more real.
"Andrew's Folk Pile"
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