Ashton Court Festival Bristol 23rd July 2006

Ethereal and splintered by turns, Bristol's favourite poetry-laced musos led us into a strange Victorian world of velvet menace. Odes by Dickinson, Wilde and Hardy, all set to slow-burn acoustic soundtracks that grew assuredly from placid to menacing.Venue

The Folk House Bristol 8th October 2005

Some bands have such a curious onstage dynamic that it’s impossible to concentrate on just the music and you find your mind wandering into more speculative, scurrilous terrain. Think Jack and Meg, Ike and Tina, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. We may soon be adding Mog and Jon aka The Wraiths to that list. They consist of one slender, bright-eyed female vocalist who sometimes plays glissando electric guitar with a nail, together with a shabby, middle-aged chap on Spanish guitar possessed of the frightening intensity of a Southern preacher and mobile, angry eyebrows. Together they set the poetry of such literary heavyweights as Emily Dickinson and Ford Madox Ford to melody. Occasionally – on the aforementioned Madox Ford rendition for example – it is exhilarating, and the rest is never less than captivating, particularly harmonies and the contrast between Mog’s cool, clear voice and the Jon’s frenetic strumming.
Believe me when I say these really work as songs rather than just poetry with accompaniment. The Wraiths either have an enviable gift of divining which poems’ metre will adapt nicely to a contemporary idiom (although I’d be hard pressed to say exactly which genre this fall under), or they work very hard to ensure the run of words is not secondary to the dynamic of the song. Or there’s a Chaucer rock-opera and other sundries on a tape-recorder in their kitchen which didn’t quite work out.
I’m all in favour of this recycling of material already out there, by the way. Why spend sleepless nights working out some semi-literate mish-mash of words which you know in your heart of hearts is second rate, when there’s already the fruits of the most rarefied experiences and most profound thoughts scattered around in libraries in every city ward? Do your incoherent ramblings really add to the sum total of human experience and expression in any meaningful way? All in the aid of “self-expression”? Good grief! Decode Publishing

Ashton Court Festival Bristol 16th July 2005

This duo took a clutch of classic pooems by Tennysion, Wilde et al out of their aspic and set them to their own edgy haunting acoustic ballads. Her voice has something of Beth Gibbon's autumnal glow: he has the wildest eyes this side of a death-metal convention. An unexpected thrill.

Venue

Il Bordello Bristol 4th July 2005

The Wraiths put poetry to music. Nothing special there you might think; after all, what is a song except a poem set to music? Well you see we are talking poems here, not lyrics: The Darkness by D. H. Lawrence; The Rooks by Tennyson; November by F. S Flint. The difference between poetry arranged as song and a song read as a poem becomes immediately palpable; poems don’t always have distinct verses and choruses, built in bridges and middle eights. Furthermore, setting them in song reveals many for what they really are, mere snippets and hints, a collection of images and metaphors suggesting a wider Gnostic beauty beyond their meaning. A poem, which may have been called The Junk of Many Pearls, is instilled with sea-shanty swinging strums and rolling vocals that wash over us: total immersion music that dunks you into the poem and gently holds you there. The duo of Mog and Jon compliment each other wonderfully; her crystal clean voice cutting through his more histrionic style of playing and occasionally over bearing backing vocals. Ending on an upbeat, rock riffed and blue toned version of Wilde’s Le Silhouette their set is almost entirely successful in its intention, with the one exception of, ironically, O’Shaunessey’s The Music Makers, the only poem not entirely perfectly realised, the vocal lines being discordant and rousing moments of brilliance being left flat by what followed. But then Elgar failed on that one too, so we’ll cut them some slack and look forward eagerly to their interpretations of Eliot, Thomas, Ginsberg and Muldoon. Decode Publishing