![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, it is the landscape itself that takes action in these songs, as in the denouement of ‘Seasons and the Storms’: ‘Gold rays of light / shine through the hammock on the lawn / breaking on the shore.’ The band’s interest in Japanese woodcuts – the instrumental ‘Naito-shinjuku’ – as well as tanka poetry and, I would imagine, Noh theatre is a logical extension of this reversal. Rather than being songs about characters that exist within a landscape, these characters exist, a bit like John Constable’s, to populate the landscape as an integral part of it. What is perhaps most confidently insistent about And Also the Trees in 2016 is this reversal of the English song tradition: from the pastoral, kestrel-hover guitar swells to the krautrock rhythms and scene-setting texts, AATT subtly turn the English folksong around to bring its background to the front. Or ‘Bridges’ with its bassline of dizzy bounces and impressionistic drumming punching against an ethereal, hovering anti-melody as Jones reads us through a bird’s-eye float over an anonymous cityscape. Or ‘Boden’, in which the band resembles, as it does often and well, the seascape swells and recessions of a Romantic string section: Simon Jones’s words describe a scene, an eponymous character moving through a landscape, the only other action the ‘thin breeze through the damson trees’. This character that should prowl and threaten instead moves philosophically intellectually rather than physically across its landscape – like the title character in John Gardner’s Grendel, a savage and an existentialist at once. Take ‘Hawksmoor and the Savage’ with its stalking rhythm, plucking along, as a portrait of a hunter appears bearing a (severed?) head. And nowhere is this more prevalent than on the band’s latest release, Born Into the Waves. Yet what it all adds up to is something wholly British in its fierce passivity – the lingering, invisible watchfulness of an English field. It’s a sound and a style the band has worked to great artistic success (and essentially zero commercial viability) ever since, adding loads of Continental flashes and flares along the way: rhythms from Vienna and Spain, from the streets of Eastern Europe and the cafes of Paris, with heavy doses of Nick Cave, Scott Walker and Nico. Led by brothers Simon (singer) and Justin (guitarist) Jones, from the idyllic village of Inkberrow in the fields east of Worcester, from the very beginning And Also The Trees was Gothic the way only a rural English band could be: a pastoral Gothicism of sentient landscapes and dark implications – rather than bloodied-teeth-and-dyed-black-hair, AATT was summer-dress-snagged-on-a-thorn-bush-its-wearer-ominously-absent.īy the time of ‘Gone … Like the Swallows’ from 1986’s Virus Meadow, the essentials of the AATT aesthetic were fully formed: ethereal, enveloping mandolin-style tremolo guitar over a punchy, punctuating rhythm section, topped with Simon Jones’ sing-spoken, image-laden poetics. ![]() The band’s 1983 debut single ‘Shantell’ rang with flanged 4AD guitars and ooh-spooky synths, but there was something more than that, too: an atmosphere more Wuthering Heights than Release the Bats. These are the scenes we are offered – a hunter defies his better nature, ‘looking out across the wastelands’ a couple lies entwined, sculpted, sleeping, acquiescent a man awakens to the harsh cry of urban reality as well as a glimpse of redemption.įor more than 30 years the Worcestershire-born band And Also The Trees has ploughed a singular furrow in the well-worn and oft-maligned field of ‘Gothic’ rock. It presents a landscape in which the sea is as deadly in its calm as its torrent, the world swirling around in ecstatic terror while we are enveloped in a kind of eerie stasis, watched but motionless. Born Into the Waves is a series of offerings, not of events of settings, not actions. ![]()
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