148. The Pentangle - Basket of Light (October 1969)

1. Light Flight*

2. Once I Had a Sweetheart

3. Springtime Promises

4. Lyke-Wake Dirge

5. Train Song*

6. Hunting Song

7. Sally Go 'Round the Roses

8. The Cuckoo

9. House Carpenter*

***1/2

The first Pentangle album was a sprightly mix of jazz and folk. The sound on this album is far denser and more claustrophobic, and draws from a much wider range of styles and genres. Personally, I tend to prefer the debut, but that's mostly because I owned it on CD for many years. This is a good album, but the music is so densely layered and complex at times that it can render the lyrics pretty difficult to understand, which is annoying when it comes to something like "The Hunting Song", which is exactly the sort of faux-mediaeval fantasy nonsense that I love.

The first really impressive thing about this album is the way it incorporates so much different music into a consistent sound. When Blood, Sweat & Tears tried to do it, they ended-up just writing terrible songs that switched genre about twice a minute. The Pentangle instead look for the commonalities in various folk traditions and then work them into a consistent folk-rock style. So one song will combine jazz timing, bossa nova "ba ba pa da" singing, a mediaeval lyric and vocal, blues guitar, and what sounds like a sitar or a tambour, all mixing perfectly with a fundamentally folk-rock approach. I've never really heard much else like it, although echoes of Basket of Light can be heard in a great amount of more recent folk music. It's all doubly impressive because this is an entirely acoustic album, but it still manages to kind of rock.

The second really impressive thing about this album is Jacqui McShee's gorgeous vocals. She gives a kind of stilted reading of most of the lyrics, but this really just reinforces the aching purity of her voice. And the bit on "House Carpenter" (one of my favourite songs) where the instruments drop out and it's just her unaccompanied voice singing about a Heaven she knows she'll never reach is just heart-breaking.

All in all this is a very good, very strange album. I like it quite a bit, but I find sometimes listening to it that the Pentangle went a little overboard, and maybe jammed a couple too many ideas into the music. That makes it brilliant if you're looking to rip them off, because there are so many great ideas, but a little fatiguing if you want to listen to the whole thing from start to finish. Still, there are lots of unexpected surprises, and several moments of real beauty here, and I'd definitely recommend tracking this down.