Will Burns & Hannah Peel – Chalk Hill Blue
On Chalk Hill Blue Hannah Peel and Will Burns manage to balance a terrible sadness with moments of absolute beauty
Poet-musician collaborations are often hit and miss affairs but Hannah Peel and Will Burns have made their first collaborative project a quietly brilliant work. Burns’ words are used sparingly across Chalk Hill Blue. Although often dwarfed by Peel’s soundscapes, it works majestically – her instrumentation sculpting the landscapes, his words populating it.
This is at its finest on The Night Life. Peel’s instrumentation is minimal, just a twitchy kick drum pattern and a distant clatter of a snare roll, as Burns reads a beautifully observed piece of quiet bar room desperation. Just as he seems to give out, collapsing under the quiet horror of the described evening, Peel’s instrumentation bursts into life in a Penderecki meets the Jaws theme music maelstrom. It's passages like this that give the record a greater musical range than a lot of poet-musician collaborations without feeling like it loses its essential sense of place.
Chalk Hill Blue deals in evocations of rural Britain but steers clear of both bland pastorals and lazy folk-horror inflected paranoia, instead providing glimpses and snippets of life to delicately and gradually create an impression of a central character and their community. There are beautiful descriptions of the rural landscape on Spring Dawn On Mad Mile, Peel conjuring little synth flourishes that creak like garden gates over a sodden bass drone. Then there’s penultimate track Summer Blues where Burns gives an utterly harrowing account of depressive domestic claustrophobia over wandering muted piano, the emotional murk present throughout the record, drifting into focus but never becoming completely clear.
On Chalk Hill Blue Peel and Burns manage to balance a terrible sadness with moments of absolute beauty. It’s a record both run through with a real darkness, the feeling of circling but never quite coming to grips with some unnamed trauma, but also an attempt to move on, to seek out compassion and beauty in the natural world and the people around you.
Listen to: Summer Blues, Spring Dawn On Mad Mile, May 9th
Hannah Peel and Will Burns play Neu! Reekie! at Queen's Hall, 11 May with Steve Mason, Hollie McNish, Aidan Moffat and more