Sairie's 'Beneath the Spreading Tree' Is a Starkly Beautiful Debut of Shadowed British Folk
Some debuts announce themselves. This one just walks in and sits down like it has always lived here. Beneath the Spreading Tree is the first full-length from Brighton’s Sairie, out on Hollow Hill Records, and The Guardian’s Jude Rogers described it as “exquisite 70s-inflected folk” whose songs have “ancient balladry tightly coiled in their DNA, arriving like they’ve lived rich, long lives already.”
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Andy Thomas’s bass is doing something unfashionable and correct here — it moves like a third voice rather than a floor, tracking the vocal lines at a distance instead of nailing down a root. Jon Griffin recorded and mixed the record himself in Newhaven, and Simon Scott mastered it at SPS Audio Mastering with the dynamic range left conspicuously intact. The Spatial Dynamics: Maria Marzaioli’s violin and Alice Eldridge’s cello are placed wide and slightly behind, so the strings read as weather rather than arrangement. Rogers praised the “shivery arrangements,” and the word is exact: nothing here is thickened, it is only made colder.
Standout Performance
Emma Morton, and specifically what Morton does with a second voice in the room. Writing in KLOF, Thomas Blake put it best — “the songs seem haunted by their own flickering shadows.” On “Three Knots,” Rogers heard “a sugar-coated duet before its descent into the depths,” which is the record’s whole method in one line: sweetness offered first, floor removed second.
Why It’s Certified
Because it never once reaches for pastiche. “Harder Than It Seemed” and “The Breeze on the Meadow” sit in a tradition running from Pentangle through Philadelphia psych-folk without doing an impression of either, and the nine-minute title track uses its length to go somewhere rather than to prove it can. Blake called the whole thing “starkly beautiful and richly rewarding.” Both halves of that are load-bearing. Certified great.