Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The exploration of the past is a welcome and worthwhile pursuit, when seen through the eyes of the group collective the results of this journey is one to take heart from, the dynamic of tossing ideas around, bouncing the traditional against the power of the contemporary and progressive is fresh, prevailing and yet is sincere in its outlook to pay homage and in the scope of the English language there is arguably no greater writer to pay that respect to than William Shakespeare.
The ten piece multi-instrumentalist folk group The Company of Players take on the Bard with stunning results in their debut album Shakespeare Songs, the musical equivalent of the R.S.C. seeking out modern interpretation and finding a new kind of liberal freedom, original yet steeped in the forthright spirituality attained by England’s greatest writer.
Brought together by Said The Maiden’s Jess Distill, this Folk supergroup includes the likes of Sam Kelly, Daria Kulesh, Chris Cleverly and Kim Lowings, holders of awards and in depth appreciation of the Folk scene, The Company of Players hold the void between light and dusk with a array of songs that have depth, meaning and more than the edge of the mystical to them, they convey the power imagined as Hamlet confronts his father’s ghost, as Macbeth wrestles with the knowledge that his soul is damned and the strangeness of potent thunderous skies revealing future’s and hidden desires.
In tracks such as the opener Black Spirits, Gather Round, Method in the Madness, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, It Was a Lover and His Lass and Jessica’s Sonnet, the harmony between the players is one that cracks the heavens and sees prophesies alluded to, a potent mix that has not right to succeed but does so because of belief, requited love and the sense of having dealt with the immortal, the power that is at the behest of all the great orators, the use of language to convey feeling, sincerity and drama, to install in the listener a rare piece of rising passion.
A stunning piece of musical art, unpretentious and yet completely out of the ordinary, Shakespeare Songs is the homage to language itself, the seekers of verbal communication and the scribes to whom solitude is often their only payment. An album filled with drama, The Company of Players should be insisted upon to come back for a second act.
Ian D. Hall