Ekiza Carthy

2022 sees Eliza celebrating an incredible 30 years in the music business with album Queen Of The Whirl, featuring new interpretations of fan-selected favourites from her previous albums, recorded with her band Eliza Carthy & The Restitution.

Specially selected 15 track compilation / Introduction note from Eliza Carthy / Features Jon Boden, John Spiers, Ben Ivitsky, Lucy Farrell and Sam Sweeney / Track by track information. Describing herself simply as a ‘modern English musician’ Eliza Carthy, has been touring on and off since the age of fourteen and first appeared on record in 1990 as a member of The Mrs Ackroyd Band alongside such notables as Les Barker, June Tabor and her father Martin Carthy. After two collaborative recordings with Nancy Kerr, she released her first solo album Heat, Light & Sound, for Topic Records in 1996, a selection of traditional songs, two of which open this new selection of her work which is drawn entirely from her solo recordings for the label and closing with a track from 2017’s Big Machine album.

Eliza Carthy officially inherits the British folk crown from her parents with the willfully traditional Rough Music. Described in the liner notes as "a form of community punishment practiced all over England" (basically a public beating for a heinous social crime), Rough Music sounds like a lost pre-percussion Steeleye Span record filtered through A.L. Lloyd's whaling collection Leviathan! Carthy's strong fiddling and powerful vocals – she really is beginning to surpass Norma – are ably enhanced by the chiseled performance of her backing band, the Ratcatchers. Together they celebrate longstanding English traditions like public execution ("Turpin Hero"), syphilis ("The Unfortunate Lass"), and alcohol ("Tom Brown") with equal parts reverence, earnestness, and mischief. Primarily arranged for violin, viola, double bass, and melodeon, Rough Music also features lovely a cappella cuts like "Maid on the Shore" and enough fiery instrumentals to keep your feet on the cobblestones during the long walk home from the pub. In fact, there's not a moment on Rough Music that isn't essential listening. Highly recommended.

Originally released in 1998 as half of the two-CD set Red Rice and reissued on its own in 2001, Red shows the alternative pop side of Eliza Carthy. There's a folkish tinge to some of the songs – the opening "Accordion Song" also shows off a facility for zydeco tunes – but the overall feel is a little more Jane Siberry than June Tabor. Even the handful of traditional English folk tunes are given adventurous treatments that stray far afield from purism; "10,000 Miles" and the blinding reel "Stingo," a showcase for Carthy's exceptional fiddle playing, have the same sort of loose, rock-oriented playfulness as the best Fairport Convention (or Cordelia's Dad) blends of pop and trad.

Ashley Hutchings produced this very lively solo album (Tony Cox adds some synthesizer on two tracks, otherwise it's just Carthy's voice and guitar, and, as on "Locks and Bolts," ajust his voice), which relies heavily on his dexterity on guitar. The sound of the latter instrument is pushed very far into the front in the mix of this, perhaps Carthy's best recorded album, with a very "hot" all-acoustic texture. Other songs include "Geordie," "King Knapperty," "Bonny Lass of Angelsea" (featuring some amazingly restrained and tasteful synthesizer), and "Palaces of Gold," the latter an angry, topical original by Leon Rosselson about a mining disaster. The only track that doesn't entirely work is "Willie's Lady," a seven minute epic that, effective as it may be in concert, needed something more than just Carthy's guitar and voice to carry it off on record.