Pump action

In harmonium, songs of exquisite exhaustion from the folk north. By Andrew Male.

WIDELY USED in small churches and private homes in the 19th century, the Victorian pedal harmonium is a curious instrument. Looking like a cross between an ecclesiastical rood screen, an upright piano and a portable church organ, when played it emits a sound that resembles the papery wheeze of a consumptive accordion, a phantasmal rasp redolent of chill sermons in flinty Anglican chapels, or forlorn shanties aboard the creaking hull of some Atlantic ghost ship. It’s a fascinating sound to sample but an odd one for a young 21st century pop-folk quartet to build their entire sound around. Formed in early 2015, when Belfast-born singer-songwriter Emily Scott recruited three other musicians – Pete Harvey of Meursault and King Creosote, Joe Smillie (boss of Glasgow’s Glad Cafe) and Lancastrian sound-artist Rob St John – to put strange flesh on the bones of her lonesome, string-borne songs, Modern Studies appear in press photos as a clean-cut folk-pop quartet, the kind of anonymous outfit happily playing fourth on the bill at a Mumford & Sons pop-up ukulele festival. However, on record, they are far stranger and finer than that. Album opener Supercool sets the mood, onionskin gasps of harmonium rising and falling as parade drums, handclaps and warm double-bass lead us through a haunted tale of stone circles, riparian landscapes, and half-heard melodies at sunset. Other gently swaying songs assemble around images of late-summer traffic, rolling tides, ditch drownings, and seabirds divebombing coastal bays; plaintive, low serenades, where Scott’s beautiful, downcast voice and the ever-present organ whine are coloured by analogue synth, cello, double bass, drums, guitar, “wine-glass orchestra”, and the wistful three-part singing of Harvey, Smillie and St John. Highlights include the eerie close harmonies of Black Street, a song seemingly based around a photograph taken from the rear window of a car on a cold seaside morning; a deliciously drowsy cover of the traditional Norfolk ballad The Bold Fisherman; the low, rainwashed waltz of Sleep, and Bottle Green, a bereft September song that calls to mind the cloistered Americana of Hem’s Rabbit Songs. Recorded at Pete Harvey’s Pumpkin Field studio in Perthshire, Swell To Great (named after one of the stops on the pedal harmonium) possesses a hazy, lambent quality, suggestive of banks of hill mist lit by an offshore littoral light. There is a calmness in its melancholy, a beauty in its blues. These are songs that see the mystical beyond the material, abstracted folk ballads awash in memory, imbued with the spectral poignancy of the summer’s end, yet also in tune with the profound sadness of our peculiar twilight age.