London’s Stick in the Wheel live up to their name: For the past few years they’ve been jabbing at the spokes of the English folk scene in their attempt to upend the system. With their 2015 full-length debut, From Here, they conceived of English folk music as something rooted in the past but not in the pastoral; the songs were urban instead of rural, social realist, often abrasive, and defiantly outside the folk mainstream. On traditional tunes dating back centuries as well as originals about the London riots and contemporary land-rights laws, Nicola Kearey sings in a voice that has more in common with Joe Strummer than with Shirley Collins. Co-founder Ian Carter eschews the jazzy improvisations that have defined UK folk guitar since the days of Davey Graham and Bert Jansch. Instead, he plays intricate looped rhythms that sound like he’s mimicking the beats he once created with the XL Recordings-signed electronic group Various Production.
They followed up From Here with a 7” single based on 17th-century ballads, a split with the Irish band Lynched, and a collection of mostly a cappella performances recorded in the living rooms and kitchens of some of the country’s biggest folk artists. With their second album, Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor. As Stick in the Wheel dig through the vast catalog of British folk music, they gravitate toward tales from the fringes of society: the destitute, the hopeless, the wronged, and the forgotten.
“Weaving Song” is a spare tune based on a traditional Scottish ballad, and Kearey navigates the intricate melody as she describes the ins and outs of the lost profession. Another traditional, “White Copper Alley,” dates back to the 19th century and finds Kearey singing in the voice of a woman driven to prostitution. As she outwits a john and steals his watch and wallet, the band settles into a complex groove as though running through the back alleys of 19th-century London. But it’s the last line and the band’s abrupt halt that stick in your wheel: “I need the money/To save my poor sonny/For without the doctor/Me boy he’d be dead.” Listening to the song in a country where healthcare is not considered a basic human right, the woman’s desperation sounds all the more powerful—and deeply relatable.
The other half of Follow Them True mixes the old with the new and pushes at the boundaries of acoustic folk. “Witch Bottle” floats on an accordion drone as though mimicking the synthesizers of a 4AD record from the 1980s. The title track is even more jarring: Not only does it have electric instruments, but Kearey’s voice is distorted and manipulated, her consonants sheared away so that it becomes pure sound against Carter’s pendulum-like guitar figures. Auto-Tune may be the least folk thing imaginable, but the way the effect is put to use on “Follow Them True” sounds uprooted from time, lending the song a strange majesty.
What’s most remarkable about Stick in the Wheel’s experiments with the contemporary and the historical is how naturally the group melds these two opposing forces. Rather than grind against each other, each benefits from the contrast. That’s especially true as the album winds down, where they move from an a cappella sing-along of the traditional “Poor Old Horse” to the reverb-drenched original “Red Carnation” and finally to the electronic pulses of “As I Roved Out,” another traditional. The sequencing only plays up the commonalities inherent in these disparate songs; it’s a reminder that we’re still singing about the same things for centuries now.
