When 12-string guitarist Sarah Louise Henson (aka Sarah Louise) first recorded the mournful ballad “The Day Is Past and Gone,” it was a very different piece of music. As the Asheville native plucked and bent the strings of her guitar, you could feel the sorrow in the song all within her playing. But on the debut release of House and Land, Louise’s new duo with multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan (of Pelt and Black Twig Pickers), it approaches the form of a folk epic. Louise has become one of the most exciting figures in solo guitar music, with a style of fingerpicking that aligns her more with banjo players and pianists, notes cascading in constant patterns like rain. In House and Land, she often takes on the role of lead vocalist, echoing the hum of Morgan’s fiddle with a sad, steady sigh.
House and Land’s self-titled debut feels expansive and immersive while using the simplest resources. Its source materials stem from centuries-old folk songs, so traditional they share lines with Old Testament verses. But Louise and Morgan attack them with urgency and excitement. The record’s best moments, like “The Day Is Past and Gone” and “Rich Old Jade,” are warmly psychedelic, proceeding patiently with minimal percussion and unfolding into new shapes at every turn. Other songs take up smaller spaces. “Listen to the Roll” is nearly a capella, with Louise singing sternly over a low drone. “I had to answer for myself,” she repeats, adding an ominous edge to the melody by raising her voice just a half-step between the syllables of “answer.” It’s a haunting sound, showing just how much these musicians can communicate with such sparse arrangements.
“It doesn’t make sense to me to draw a hard line about what is folk music and what is avant-garde,” Louise has said, “Because so many ‘folk’ musicians are incredibly inventive and plenty of ‘avant-garde’ artists are just doing the same stuff over and over again.” This tension—between new and old, between folk and avant-garde—is the driving force of House and Land. The sounds throughout the album are alluringly simple: the primitive buzz of a shruti box, the percussive trill of a banjo, the fluttering sound of the pair’s tight, ghostly harmonies. In the opening track “Wandering Boy,” House and Land illustrate their potential as a more accessible folk duo, with a straightforward arrangement that places an emphasis on melody and harmony. But the pair are not just content to retell stories from the past; they also take pleasure in bending them at their will.
For their rendition of Shirley Collins’ “The False True Lover,” Morgan maintains the song’s persistent flow while slightly restructuring the melody, adding a new emotional undercurrent similar to Sam Amidon’s reinterpretations on I See the Sign. In “Johnny”—a song the duo discovered on a late ’90s private press folk album—they shift the song’s subject from “father” to “mother” and replace the word “sterling” with “garland,” because, according to the liner notes, “[It was] more to our liking.” These subtle, personal changes are indicative of the album’s success. House and Land don’t just make these songs their own: they effectively reclaim them, illustrating that they’ve always been theirs.
