Ones to watch. The Sea Nymphs
Michael Arnold; A&R Review Magazine
They’ve just recorded an album, they’re on the Alphabet Business Concern and Tim Smith is in the band. So what the hell are they doing in Ones To Watch where bands without those advantages should be getting vital exposure? Well, I reckon that anything Tim Smith gets involved in deserves all the exposure it can get. Somehow he’s managed to keep releasing records totally self-funded and by doing a bit of production here and there it means that he can (just about) afford to offer the ungrateful world another collection of his maverick creations.
The Sea Nymphs cover parallel ground to the Cardiacs, it’s no less intense and no less compelling, but without the breakneck speed and thickness of sound. The Sea Nymphs also boasts the talents of ex-Cardiacs members William D. Drake (keyboards) and Sarah Smith (clarinet, recorders), and all three sing and bang things! There are no loud guitars or drums, just the tinkle of piano, stabs of keyboards and Sarah’s lovingly blown wind instruments.
The beauty of Tim Smith’s music is that when you start drawing comparisons things start getting really out of hand. I think I could only cite Kate Bush as another contemporary artist who has that extremely rare gift of complete originality, or at least the ability to transcend influences to such an extent that similarities are faintly whispered and never shouted. Even so I’ll try and give you an idea of what they sound like. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra spring to mind as does the aforementioned Ms Bush but it’s not so much a musical similarity as much as a beauty and wildness of spirit. It’s extremely evocative, very moving music, that will fill your head with pictures. There’s something very ancient and mystical about the feeling you get listening to this record, as if a ghost is leading you back through a previous life, all the time whispering bizarre fairy tales into your ear. The song titles and lyrics are pure Tim Smith, meaningless yet making so much sense at the same time, filled with glorious and ingenious word play.
‘Shaping the River’ and ‘Sarah on a Worm’ are fluid and haunting. ‘A Thousand Strokes And A Rolling Suck’ and ‘Dog Eat Spine’ are dead weird but jolly too. ‘Lilly White’s Party’ and ‘Lucky Lucy’ is music to skip between astral planes to. While ‘Appealing to Venus’ is psychedelia at it’s purest (Beach Boys) , and somehow they’ve managed to make the melody seem filled with light!!
If you read the Tim Smith interview in this issue you’ll know that some of this was recorded in the woods at night (as the sleeve notes say ‘Thank you to the snails for weighing down the wires into the woods’ which is another lovely image for you). On ‘Lily Whites Party’ you can hear a tree bough creak, birds twittering and a cat mewing. It’s these little touches that make the Sea Nymphs so treasurable. They really put the mind into imagery overdrive. This is music to pay attention to, to revel in. Let it slip into the background at your peril!
So The Sea Nymphs poured their love into this record, but what does that count for? These are the days that Rowdy Roddy fucking Piper gets a record deal, Naomi Campbell effortlessly joins the Sony roster, and any talentless soap-star fuckwit can get a record in the shops at the drop of a hat. I suppose it must come down to the simple fact that genius just ain’t fashionable!
Michael Arnold.
THE SEA NYMPHS
Appealing To Venus EP
Org Records Ltd.
ORGAN 044CD
CD-only EP
There’s something about the “Appealing To Venus” EP which sounds incredibly ancient. Not dated, as such – for all its leanings towards progginess, it’s nothing passe or stilted, and any awkwardness is an integral part of the charm. No, it’s the murky timelessness and pre-tech fragility of the songs. It’s music in the trembling, bewildered nude; emerging from its shell of strength to blink in the light and to voice, in a halting manner, its own concerns, as the bright lights and brash neon of the pop scene whirl around it, uncomprehending.
Not that it’s come from nowhere. The Sea Nymphs are an (almost) acoustic alter-ego for the manically electric and intense Cardiacs: a mass of scrawny acoustic guitars, “Rock Bottom” harmoniums, mellotrons and melodicas, baroque Black Death keyboards, crumhorn saxes and touchingly scratchy singing. Cardiacs’ convoluted songs have always had threads of Early Music woven into them.
With The Sea Nymphs, we get to wind back along those threads and see where they lead. These four tracks (salvaged from the Nymphs’ criminally ignored debut album) exorcise, or exercise, Cardiacs’ curiosity about pre-pop. You can hear old folk melodies seeping into Low Church music, shreds of sea-shanties and work-song, ramshackle European fragments existing independently of the blues or classical traditions…The bits that pop forgot, in other words. Though compared to, say, Dead Can Dance’s lordly, haughty take on Early Music,
The Sea Nymphs sound as if they’ve crawled their ungainly way out of a Vincent Ward peasant odyssey of quivering, shipwrecked dreams and prayers. Listening to “Appealing To Venus”’s reedy, marchy slog of careening organs, plodding piano and parping synth you hear a heartbreakingly wistful devotion. In the giant cathedral boom of “Up In Annie’s Room”, string synths smear the shuddering air around Tim’s cracked, lost, voice, swallowing it up in a churchy swamp of sound: he sounds as if he’s trying to outshout a God who’s cold and indifference to his vulnerable defiance. The mediaeval shawm-sneeze of “God’s Box” – fifty people on comb, paper and bells – seems lighter, but its skipping ward against evil (“God’s good, the Devil is bad – he always gives me money,”) sounds ambiguous in Sarah’s blank, gauzy, little-girl vocals. “Never Setting Things on Fire, / never BAD…” she sings, as if considering her options.
It’s left to the exquisite “Shaping The River” (in which a lilting falsetto choir sways, shantylike, behind watery spangles of piano) to bring us something to warm our bared hearts. A work-song, something shared; a relationship with nature even as you alter it: “River in the middle of / Nowhere / Three minnows suck on its heart, / and its hair. / …Plant the heart, all from the heart / …only in the heart.”
The skeletal bonus tracks – lifted from even older tapes by “Mr & Mrs Smith & Mr Drake”, the prototype Nymphs – pull us further into blurry pasts. There’s Bill’s gentle, bemused “Camouflage”, a twelve-tone sprig on Syd Barrett’s nursery-rhyme legacy: and the meandering but intensely purposeful tone poem “Little Creations”, clambering like a drunken squirrel from branch to branch and complete with manuscript rustling and equipment fumbling. “Hymn” rounds everything off; a live bootleg of Tim blinking over an austere organ sound, a pagan taking his first faltering steps into the chapel. These songs, too, have that unnervingly ancient-but-ageless quality; the same indefinable, painful, yet suspect innocence that haunts the songs of Robert Wyatt or Elizabeth Fraser.
Which all means that The Sea Nymphs are both as frail and damp as a newborn and as old as the hills. Just listening to them pulls you back that much closer to the original greenwood, little shoots cracking their way out of your hidden memories.
(DANN CHINN)