Laura Cannell: Brightly Shone the Moon Review – Melancholy and Beauty in a Haunting Hymn Collection | Popular music

TTraditional music finds a popular and comforting home in carols, despite the strangeness surrounding the nativity story, and the fraying thread back to the past that every winter brings. A veteran explorer of the season (on 2020’s sparkling Winter Rituals EP with cellist Kate Ellis, and 2022’s New Christmas Rituals, with amped-up violin from André Bosman), Laura Cannell embarks on her best and darkest journey yet here, exploring the time of year when, as she writes on the liner notes, “joy and heartache try to co-exist.”

Named after the line in Good King Wenceslas before the hard frost arrives, Brightly Shone the Moon begins at the organ – a nod to the Christmases Cannell experienced in Cannell’s childhood in chapels and Methodist churches in Norfolk. Then Cannell’s violin trembles around the 16th-century folk melody of O Christmas Tree/O Tannenbaum, as if the hymn was swirling around in a snow globe, trying to settle into memory. All Ye Faithful follows, full of vague repetitions of pre-chorus verses, with the choruses typically singing “Come adore him.” But here, love seems stuck, rooted like an animal to the ground, a sonic reminder of how stifling and difficult winter can be for many.

Beauty appears elsewhere. The soaring melodies of “Lost in a Merry Christmas” seem to wrap around each other beautifully in the air, then melt together. Bleak Midwinter has an icy, urgent rush to it, replacing gloom with a kind of playful hope. The apocalyptic title Angels Fallen from the Realms is the warmest of all, filled with flashes of long-forgotten chants that magically appear and disappear. This is not an album made for parties or tree decorations, but an album that carries you, achingly, through time, snippets of old songs lighting the way like Christingles.

Also out this month

Anna PidgornaInvented Folk Songs (Red Shift) is the remarkable result of the Ukrainian-Canadian singer traveling to Ukraine to study with traditional music practitioners, then adopting folk idioms into her own free and avant-garde style. The album ranges from gorgeously brutal power on tracks like Drown in the Depth to urgent longing on What Else Can I Give Him?

Released just in time for Hanukkah, Michael Winograd Tanz plays! (Borscht Beat) is an energetic live performance by clarinetist Winograd of the famous 1955 klezmer album by Dave Taras and the Mosiker Brothers, which fused traditional Ashkenazi Jewish instrumental music with jazz.

Great winter bandJoy Illimited (self-released) brings together folk musicians Jennifer Crook, MacLean Colston, Soul Rose and Beth Porter to make a mixed bag of festive tunes. The best ones are Shepherds Are the Cleverest Lads, which I learned from the Watersons, and Boo Hewerdine’s New Year’s Eve.