Poetry and song are related, but they’re not kissin’ cousins, more first cousins at one remove. Composers of art song in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to poets for their song cycles, and rock-era lyrics have often been hailed as poetry, but what happens when a poet – a page poet, albeit adept at performance – combines with musicians and lyricists and adds his own voice to the mix; his reading voice, not a singing one.
In the case of Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, former probation officer and resident poet with LYR, he’s fortunate in his collaborators, singer-songwriter Richard Walters, with his fine and distinctive lyrical vocals, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson, who with Armitage work up a broad palette of sounds and settings for their third album Dark Sky Reservation.
It opens with the title track, Walter’s lyrical vocals framing the poetic core of Armitage’s reading over a heavy, steady, slow-moving river of organ chords and chorale. "Remember the stars overhead, like coins in a well. It was cold she said, no it was life in infra-red…" Riffing with his often witty, air-refreshing two-liners, here he flexes a poetic impressionism, skittering from image to image, domestics and reveries wrapped in flowing rhymes. It sits lightly and expands easily. There’s plenty to dive in to, bags of imagery to draw out, and a great big bed of music to lay it on.
The conceit of needing darkness to see the stars is a holding pattern across the album, from the Dark Sky Reservation of the title – a designation for light-free areas protected from light pollution – through to the dream-time sound of the glockenspiel that opens “The Goldilocks Zone” (that part of the solar systems our planet happily circulates). But Armitage is no Trekkie. His lines are more drawn from familiar earthbound domesticities, upon which everything depends, including finding the time and the space to look up at the stars.
The atonal, woozy “Eclipse” and the trip-hop quote-marks wrapped around “Sirius Alpha Sirius Beta” expand on and circle the cosmic themes, while others, like “Where Have You Been All My Life” spin out an ersatz blizzard of products, attachments and supporting roles that’s reminiscent of an Armitage hero, Mark E Smith. The poet’s unleashed more than usual here. Which is what you want.
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