What Goes Up.....

Nothing to do with RVW, The Lark Descending by Chris Woods is obviously deliberately titled and it is a powerful collection of songs both traditional and original that give a picture of life in England today( as distinctly opposed to Britain ). In every sense a solo album, all vocals and instrumentation are by Chris Woods, proficient on both guitar and especially fiddle. There are three traditional songs including the dangerously over exposed John Barleycorn, which just about survives yet another outing, the seafaring Our Captain Calls All Hands and Lord Bateman, that rarity, an English folk song with a happy ending. The originals are mainly Woods compositions, although their are two by sometime collaborator Hugh Lupton, including the folk award winning One In a Million ( curiously another happy ending song ) Not everything on the album is as upbeat however. Albion is a dark piece which starts with finding a young male suicide hanging from a tree in a local park. And the other Lupton song, Bleary Winter, mourns the loss of rural identity in England following the enclosure movement. But other places on the disk contain affectionate tributes to his children and the disk ends affirmatively with Walk This World, about continuing and adding to the heritage of music from one's own locality.