The Crooked Fiddle Band - The Free Wild Wind And The Songs Of Birds (2024) [Hi-Res]

Art As Catharsis are proud to announce the upcoming album from The Crooked Fiddle Band, The Free Wild Wind & the Songs of Birds - an expansive and cinematic release which weaves together folk music traditions, post and progressive rock, and chamber music.

The Free Wild Wind has a more reflective air than its predecessors, with a renewed focus on cinematic composition and dynamics. One can hear the influence of Norwegian chamber-prog band Meer in the expanded orchestration, the epic flavour of the film scores of Bear McCreary, and a Celtic crossover flavour that brings to mind The Decemberists, or even further echos of 70s mainstays Planxty or Steeleye Span roaring into the 21st century.

“This album is more pastoral, more folk-based than much of our previous output,” explains guitarist and cittern player Gordon Wallace. “Revisiting earlier albums we noticed the sheer intensity of them, and wanted to create a more dynamic album of rare peaks, that spends more time in the valleys and the hinterland.”

As a result, The Free Wild Wind finds ample space for both the quiet beauty of Jess Randall’s compositions and Gordon Wallace’s timeless songwriting, while allowing for the instrumental pieces to swell and contract with ease and grace. It also showcases the band’s ability to evoke landscape and narrative in purely instrumental pieces - listening to the album images of sweeping mountain vistas, mist-covered forests, and the dry soil of the outback are often conjured in the mind's eye.

The Free Wild Wind marks the band’s fourth album, and the second to be recorded by engineer Clayton Segelov. It follows two albums recorded with Steve Albini, Overgrown Tales (2011) and Moving Pieces Of The Sea (2013), and the band’s ARIA-nominated record Another Subtle Atom Bomb (2019).

The quartet are joined by guest vocalists on three songs, with multi ARIA and Golden Guitar winner Fanny Lumsden featuring on A Cold Wind Blows, her brother Tom Lumsden adding his voice to The Call, and Richard Cuthburt singing the beautiful cowboy lament of Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie - performed to a wonderfully subtle 25/8 rhythm.

As the culmination of 18 years of composing, performing and touring together, The Free Wild Wind & the Songs of Birds may be the band’s most fully realised artistic statement to date. It’s an album which reveals a band masterfully in control of their art form, boasting sophisticated, and deeply-felt compositions from a band at the height of their powers.

The Crooked Fiddle Band’s new album The Free Wild Wind & the Songs of Birds is out 7 June 2024 on Art As Catharsis.

Tracklist:
1.01 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - Midnight Frost… (1:27)
1.02 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - …Frost on the Thistledown (3:31)
1.03 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - A Cold Wind Blows (3:47)
1.04 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - Return of the Blackwing (3:25)
1.05 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie (4:26)
1.06 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - Deadly Nightsnakes (3:40)
1.07 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - Now Only the Flowers Gather (5:12)
1.08 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - The Wood Wakes (6:56)
1.09 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - Old Thunder (5:15)
1.10 - The Crooked Fiddle Band - The Call (2:48)