HOUSE AND LAND
Across The Field THRILL JOCKEY
8/10
SHIRLEY COLLINS has always maintained that it’s impossible to damage old folk songs. All you can really aim to do is enhance them, she’s argued, to bring a freshness and modernity without sacrificing their true essence.
It’s something that North Carolina duo House And Land understand only too well. For them, Collins’ music – often in tandem with her sister Dolly – has been a lodestar for their own journey through the expanses of traditional song. One of the most arresting moments on Across The Field, this latest album, is “Blacksmith”, a song that Collins recorded three times over the years, each with different verses. House And Land have chosen to reshape it as a textural drone, an experimental piece full of slowly shifting shadows, backlit by fiddle and the harmonium-like tones of a shruti box. Out front, the interlaced voices of Sarah Louise Henson and
