Review: Cinder Well Finds Inspiration in Isolation on 'No Summer'
If any album was ever appropriately named, it is No Summer from Cinder Well. The self-described “doom folk” group led by California-born and County Clare, Ireland-based Amelia Baker is about as far from the stereotypical sun, fun, beaches, and beers of summer.
No Summer is, instead, an overcast winter day. The spare, almost minimalist, instrumentation giving rise to thoughts of bare trees and brown grass. Baker's haunting vocals, think Sinead O'Connor meets Ralph Stanley, could be a chill wind whistling through the branches. The lyrics bring images of frozen waterways, empty lanes, and tiny churches in disrepair.
Cinder Well emerged, in part, from the area's metal and post-metal scene and those influences are pronounced throughout No Summer. While most of the instruments are acoustic and most of the melodies rooted in folk, there's a definite undercurrent of Tony Iommi's signature funereal Black Sabbath drone. I've always maintained that metal and Appalachian/Irish folk have more in common than different and Cinder Well is proof of concept. The aggression, or nihilism, common to most metal is here replaced with desolation, loneliness, a sense of being lost in a crowded room. When Baker, raised in a non-religious Jewish family, sings about the Catholic Church that is the center of much of Ireland's culture, or “the circuit board of the town” as she calls it on the album's standout track “From Behind the Curtain, you can feel the hollowness of the outsider (a common trope in metal). In the same song, Baker moans “I went into the church for the first time like a spy” and later “the holy water burns, and I choke on the sacrament.”
Another standout track is “The Cuckoo.” A traditional British folk song of indeterminate age, and one of many with a bright and direct line to Appalachia, where it has been reworked for banjo and covered by numerous artists, including Jean Ritchie. Cinder Well's version goes for a spare and mournful electric guitar in their cover, which fits snugly with the lyrics. “Come all you young women, take warning by me. Never give your affections to the love of a man. For the roots will wither, the branches decay. He'll turn his back on you and he'll walk square away.”
Cinder Well feeds the influence back the other direction with the album's opener “Wandering Boy.” Originally written and recorded by Kentucky folk singer Roscoe Holcomb, the band adds a signature Irish fiddle drone that, if you didn't know better, could have as easily been a Lunasa original, if filtered through a bit of Primordial or Cruachan for seasoning.
If you're looking for an album to wash away the COVID quarantine blues... you might want to go buy a Jimmy Buffett record instead. If you are one who embraces the darker recesses, who wants to hear an album that understands the isolation, depression, and near apocalyptic feel of 2020, No Summer is going to get you where you want to go. It wasn't an album written or recorded for a pandemic no one could have predicted. But sometimes whatever mysterious force drives the creation of art knows what is needed before it reaches human consciousness. Cinder Well is the vessel for that force, and No Summer is likely to be the best unintentional quarantine soundtrack that the year will see. Terry Pratchett once wrote “Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” No Summer might very well be that darkness, waiting patiently for the light to arrive again.