Sam Lee - Old Wow

The Guardian 80

(Cooking Vinyl)
Lee’s twee-free third album, produced by Bernard Butler and featuring Liz Fraser, is a stark reminder of this country’s environmental concerns

Sam Lee has always sat slightly awkwardly within folk music. He has a raffish campness live, that betrays his past as a burlesque dancer. He had a Top 20 single last year when he edited birdsong together for the RSPB’s Let Nature Sing. He’s now made an album produced by guitar demigod Bernard Butler, with guest vocals from the Cocteau Twins’ rarely heard Liz Fraser. Such cheek only reveals his desire to project his love of folk further.

Old Wow is Lee’s phrase about the enduring power of nature. But the crisis that surrounds it twists its gnarly roots around these songs. His choices are obviously political: in Turtle Dove, he isn’t mourning a metaphorical lover, as many have before him, but the actual bird, which is facing extinction. In The Moon Shines Bright, a song Lee collected from Gypsy singer Freda Black, he mourns “our time is not long / Time’s an old folk song”, as Liz Fraser sings a fragment of Scottish ballad Wild Mountain Thyme around him, high and eerie like a nightingale, about the summertime blooming. The effect is urgent, far from twee.

Fri Jan 31 08:30:40 GMT 2020

The Guardian 80

(Cooking Vinyl)
Lee pursues his twin passions on this fine third album, produced by Bernard Butler, with a star turn by Elizabeth Fraser

Ever since childhood singalongs around the fires of Forest School Camps, folksong and mother nature have been indivisible passions for Sam Lee. The singer’s third album, the first with Suede’s Bernard Butler producing, fuses the two obsessions in dazzling fashion. Once again the songs are all traditional, while Lee has skilfully intercut some and “rewilded” them with the odd flourish – the “Old Wow” of the title is his name for an awestruck sense of nature.

The album frequently sounds far from traditional, however. Lee’s rich baritone voice carries the imprint of folk past – no one does “unaccompanied” better – but he can also slide into 1950s crooner (he has been known to sport a tux). Butler knows when to leave well alone, but adds jazzy shadings for The Garden of England and Sweet Sixteen, a touch of rock muscle for Lay This Body Down, and swelling strings for Soul Cake. There’s also a spine-tingling duet with the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser on Wild Mountain Thyme. It’s a daring piece of chamber folk whose human dramas – abandonment, loss, love – come suffused with the natural world. Green Grow the Rushes, O will never sound the same again.

Sat Feb 01 16:00:19 GMT 2020