Basic Country Mustard

The sixth Red River Dialect album, and first in six years, picks up where 2019’s Abundance Welcoming Ghosts left off; lyric-focussed folk-rock which is neither transatlantic nor straining for trad-British authenticity. The band formed in 2008 in Cornwall around Cornish songwriter David John Morris, but following a decade or more living in London (with other members scattered further) the Celtic claims have hollowed out some; just another Basic Country boy singing in the big smoke.

There is, however, one song on the record which David claims to be the “most non-Cornish language Cornish song ever”.  ‘Torrey Canyon, Lyonesse’ lands us in the midst of the 1967 sinking of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, and a slick which stretched to Brittany, named the “marée noire” (black tide) by locals there. Following a thorough bombing by the Royal Air Force the hull came to rest on the sea floor where the remains of Lyonesse, a mythic land inundated in 1099, are said to lie. The song traces a link between aristocratic survivors of a lost paradise and those building climate catastrophe-proof bunkers.

The Basic Country on show here is, at times, quite country. ‘Fire BB (Frocks of the Parson)’ lopes along, with estuary English vowels tugging at the sleeves of a visiting Nashvillian (or should we say Nashvillain; this is one for the reforming people pleasers out there). Throughout the album Robin Lane-Roberts’ piano brings out the more tender shades, poignant here on a song which swaggers but is ultimately about finding a grounded path to openness. ‘Sheep’s Clothing’ nods to Jake Xerxes Fussell songs about being “gone and going” and no amount of anglophonics could hide the guilty pleasure of these cowboy chords. The album starts with Simon Drinkwater’s majestic celtic harp on ‘This Restlessness’ and ends with Edd Sanders’ soaring fiddle and thicc Uilleann piping (‘Curse is Broken’) showing us that this is also a band that would like to jam with Alan Stivell and Seamus Ennis in Lyonesse.