Since the early part of the decade, singer and multi-instrumentalist Margaret Wienk has been firmly entangled within the twisting vines of Philadelphia's prolific psych-folk community. Along the way she has recorded with such luminaries as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Espers, Damon and Naomi, and Philly's cult-soundtrack troupe The Valerie Project. But her primary vehicle as a singer and songwriter has been Fern Knight, a folk-rock quartet whose debut album Seven Years of Severed Limbs first appeared in 2003. In the time since then, Wienk's songwriting has grown increasingly pastoral and gothic, and with their eponymous third album, Fern Knight now can sound as if they are in deliberate retreat from our current millennium.
Philadelphia's communal folk scene has been so vibrant that it has become that much more difficult for individual talents to distinguish themselves. This has especially been the case for Fern Knight, as Wienk and her group so clearly share a sensibility and common pool of folk influences with Espers. This affinity is further heightened on Fern Knight by the involvement of Espers' Greg Weeks-- an omnipresent figure where Philly psych-folk is concerned-- who helped produce the album and contributes some guest backing vocals.
As with Espers, the music of Fern Knight echoes the spirit and atmosphere of any number of obscure 1970s British folk-rock acts while managing to not sound specifically like any one in particular. The closest ancestors to their sound might be early Steeleye Span, who made similar use of violin and guitar pairings, and the darker orchestrations of such vintage underground acts as Comus or Oberon. Though these rather musty influences risk turning Fern Knight into something of a restoration piece, the album succeeds in large part due to Wienk's classical roots and her innate melodic instincts.
The album fairly overflows with images of greenery and the natural world, as Wienk's lyrics abound with fiddlehead ferns, waves of seafoam, various forest critters, and romantic beds of pine needles and moss. Throughout the album, however, a dark undercurrent of trouble and dissonance lurks beneath these deceptively placid idylls. On the opening "Bemused" the group's subtle washes of cymbal, harp, and acid guitar loom like ominous thunderheads, while James Wolf's violin provides a spot-on melancholic tug to the lovely, haiku-like "Hawk Mountain".
Predictably enough, these dark tides eventually draw Fern Knight in a progressively apocalyptic direction, and-- with a nod to hallowed psych-folk tradition-- does so in the form of a song suite. Lofty aspirations aside, the album closing three-part "Magpie Suite" results in some of the group's most sumptuous and satisfying work to date. (The piece even opens with a lyrical reference to Milton's Paradise Lost just in case you might otherwise underestimate the gravity of the situation.) In a form that owes as much to chamber music as to folk, this elegiac suite layers cello, violin, and harp beneath the overlapping vocals of Wienk and Weeks before cycling to a lovely, Baroque choral finish that points hopefully toward the prospect of rebirth and a new dawning.
Needless to say, some of Fern Knight's anachronistic details will require a certain level of tolerance that some more temporally grounded listeners might lack. (Personally I wish that Wienk and Weeks had opted to use fewer spacey echo effects on her otherwise crystalline vocals.) But throughout the album, glimmers of invention and humor are allowed to shine through, such as on the wry "Synge's Chair". What sounds on the surface to be yet another somber treatment of a traditional folk dirge instead reveals itself to be a comic Irish travelogue. As the song details their journey, a group of travelers give up their search for the elusive Synge's Chair landmark and instead go have a drink in a bar, returning at last to the present and to those traditions that should be relatable to all listeners.
