UK singer Sharron Kraus is one I’ve tended to associate with traditional English folk and ballad form, and her imaginative take on these very English traditions has been very inspiring. She was often drawn to the tragic end of the scale and songs about murder and death and lost love, which she delivered convincingly with her unsentimental, spare voice. Her interest in this area may have reached some kind of apogee with 2015’s Friends and Enemies, Lovers and Strangers, where she delivered an ambitious rethink of the Mabinogion, an important piece of literature which may have been derived from pagan themes and oral traditions.
With today’s album Kin (NIGHTSHADE RECORDS NSR003), Kraus has moved on considerably – barely a trace of traditional folk now, she’s written all the songs herself (with the assist of Pat Gubler on one track), and even the sound of her music has updated to include sequencers, synths, programming, drum machines, and a bass guitar. Kraus still sings and plays guitar, and some of the synths herself, and her band comprises Guy Whittaker, Neal Heppleston, and James Street; and the wonderful Nick Jonah Davis adds his characteristic slide guitar to a few songs. If you were worried that she’s now become Tanita Tikaram, rest assured that the arrangements still have that distilled simplicity that’s one of her hallmarks, and Kin is refreshingly under-produced – plenty of air and space and light in all the songs. Kraus also remains true to the themes and topics that she loves and knows so well – death, lost love, pain, loneliness. Some of the songs allude, I think, to the difficulty (if not the sheer impossibility) of truly knowing or loving another person – “how shall we weigh the harm we do each other?”, she muses, and poignantly observes “I love the glow of your skin in the light”.
We also find an abundance of symbols, riddles, and metaphors – taking the pastoral imagery of English folk, and then re-applying to it to contemporary, complex ideas. ‘Weft and Warp’ is one example of this, its six verses packed with simple country images – creepers, bindweed, bees, roses, birds, snakes, trees, snow, grass, fruit… – yet it adds up to a profound and rather melancholy rumination on the unknowable nature of things. The second, and even better, example is ‘The Locked Garden’, a song which I’d be quite happy to take as an update on ‘The Water Is Wide’, a forlorn song about love where the singer laments “I cannot get over…and neither have I wings to fly”. In Kraus’s lyric, there’s “a garden behind a locked door…and if you glimpse it you’ll want to see more”. Alluding to the (male) gatekeepers of this place, Kraus has come up with a strong metaphor that could apply from anything to original sin and the forbidden fruit, to online services like Facebook (often called the walled garden of the internet). The singer’s solution to this frustrating dilemma is manifold – she waits until moonrise, hinting at a magical rite, and uses her powers to borrow from the owl and the panther (“more feral than genteel”) to make her way past the guards. Even the front cover art alludes to this animal magic, showing a face with cat’s eyes surrounded by a halo of bees.
A most welcome development from this fine English singer and player. From 20th September 2022.