This year has been a very active year for adaptations of William Blake set to music. We have already covered a couple of new releases this year, such as Astralingua's wonderful album Safe Passage which includes a version of the Song of Experience, "A Poison Tree", as well as the avant guard album by Josef van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch, An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil. What follows now is a roundup of some of the other new releases of the first part of 2019.
The first release of the year was by hip-hop/punk crossover band, Msngrs. Their album, Psychopomp & Circumstance, featuring synthesisers and modules with stripped-back percussion and clipped vocals transforms "The Tyger" into a rhythmic rap song and is rapidly becoming the most-listened to track by Msngrs on various streaming services. It is, I must be honest, a version that left me cold at first - precisely because it is so regular in its somewhat pounding beat. It has grown on me a great deal, especially insofar as the interludes with choppy funk guitar break that regularity to make it more of a fun dance track.
The next item is very different, both in terms of style and the fact that it is a complete album devoted to adaptations of the works of Blake. Fearful Symmetry: The Songs of William Mac Davis brings together eight settings of Blake's works as well as another of other compositions by Mac Davis, a composer who has studied at the universities of Mississippi and Utah but has previously released little other work. This album brings together a number of pieces from previous years: there are elements of Britten's experiments in chromaticism on some of the tracks, particularly "The Sick Rose" (an especially haunting piece) and "The Tyger", while others such as "The Shepherd" and "A Cradle Song" share similarities with elements of more traditional English classical or even folk music. It is too simplistic to say that the more complex pieces are those from Songs of Experience - "The Lamb" for example, combines elements of chromatic piano scales, performed with a beautiful reserve by Robert Carl Smith, to accompany Lynda Poston-Smith's voice, one which is often haunting and powerful. It is surprising that Mac Davis has not released more music earlier, as there are some particularly bold interpretations of Blake's work in the classical tradition.
Very different is Light Mind Rising by The Mighty Ur: a mixture of prog-rock and experimental metal, the group work with figures such as the poet Steve Mcauliffe who provides the lyrics and vocals for many of their tracks. There is an echo of groups such as Godflesh as though interpreted via Julian Cope, and the group invoke Blake as a spirit throughout many of the pieces. It is most evident, however, in "Fourfold City", which is not a direct setting of Blake's work but rather a riff on London through Blake's visionary poetics, with Mcauliffe invoking images of hope and angels in a cityscape that owes much to Blake's Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion and his Song of Experience, "London". Blake figures as the poet into whom Milton entered via his left foot, and that prophet who had to break systems to create his own. The track - and indeed the album - becomes strangely hypnotic at various points.
More direct interpretations of Blake come via the album Visions of William Blake by Mick and Kate Stannard, a mixture of straighforward musical settings of various poems by the Romantic as well as spoken-word pieces with a musical accompaniment. The opening track, "The Garden of Love", is a strong example, although personally I prefer the ones where Kate sings Blake's lyrics - as in "A Poison Tree". It is these tracks (which also include "Holy Thursday" and "The Lamb" - this veers in a very sinister fashion from Blake's original text towards the end) which tend to accompany her voice with simpler guitar or string instruments that are most effective for me, although some of the other incantatory or spoken pieces, such as "The Sick Rose" can also be strangely appealing.
Finally, a more recent addition to the Blakean oeuvre is Nerina Pallot's double A-side single, English/Jerusalem. Pallot has previously released five albums and was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for her 2007 song, "Sophia". This latest release is a an almost perfect combination of piano and her voice for "English", and guitar for "Jerusalem", which carries with it echoes of Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, both in terms of range and the somewhat idiosyncratic singer-songwriter traits of both figures. "Jerusalem" is a fine rendition, but the real killer is "English" which is simply superb. It's final line - "This broken-down Jerusalem is still my home" gives some sense of the ironic sense of the lyrics of the entire song. That said, her rendition of the Parry hymn is very fine, belonging as it does to the English folk tradition of performing the archetypal English song, which began with Don Partridge and has been heard more recently in the work of figures such as Chris Wood. This is a must-listen for any Blake fans for 2019.
You can hear all the albums and tracks listed here on Spotify: