Album Review: Kim Guy - Wednesday's Child (Wyrdwyrks Records)

Previously known for her work on such projects as Elowen and the Rowan Amber Mill, Cornwall-based Kim Guy has me wondering how she finds the time to fit it all in. Her latest venture comes in the form of an atmospheric debut solo record on which the singer/multi-instrumentalist arranges and plays everything herself. It's dark and melancholic but WEDNESDAY'S CHILD is certainly not full of woe.

Hard working and focused, Kim presents an album of familiar songs that are stamped with her own indelible mark. On her previous projects, both of which are still going strong, we are reminded of that oft-quoted remark 'I don't really like folk music, but I like all that stuff in The Wicker Man.' I guess the music Kim is associated with would be right down their country lane, assuming those people were indeed talking about the music and not Britt Ekland's strange dance routines. I think what they are saying is that they are drawn to ethereal Pagan ritual music, which has an enigmatic magnetism. Kim has this in buckets.

WEDNESDAY'S CHILD does start with several startling beats from what you imagine to be a very large primitive drum, not difficult to imagine Christopher Lee banging along to whilst dancing up the lane wearing a dress, but that's where the similarity ends. The album plays out to be both charming and engaging and as far removed from that strangely inhabited remote Scottish Island as possible.

The song selections come from a wide spectrum including both traditional and contemporary but all with a cohesive unity. Revisiting Neil Young (Old Man was included on the earlier Elowen album), Kim transforms Like A Hurricane into a pastoral hymn rather than the grunge anthem it has always been fondly remembered as. Like the opening song, Rolling of the Stone, Blood and Gold returns to ritualistic chanting and heavy drum beating with Andy Irvine and Jane Cassidy's Romanian song, originally sung by Lucienne Purcell on Irvine's RAINY SUNDAYS WINDY DREAMS album and then again by Silly Sisters Maddy Prior and June Tabor on their NO MORE TO THE DANCE album, the title of which was taken from this totally absorbing song.  

Anguish and torture comes into play with Tears For Fears' Watch Me Bleed, which is handled with warmth and sensitivity and is as far removed from the synth-rocker we all remember from the 1980s on that band's debut album. Paul Simon's Sparrow is also given the ethereal Kim Guy treatment, removing the Spanish influence of Simon and Garfunkel's original altogether and becoming somehow quintessentially English.

Touching on what we might all agree to be two quintessentially English voices, we come to Richard Thompson and Steve Knightly with Dimming of the Day from the former's quill and Exile from the latter's pen. Both songs are stripped down to the essentials with sparse piano accompaniment and both sit nicely along side each other here.

With three well known traditional songs Rolling of the Stone, She Moved Through the Fair, notably re-named 'He' Moved Through the Fair, strange given that it's an instrumental, and finally the Unquiet Grave, Kim's Tubular Bells excursion demonstrates an artist at work and the fruition of all those many days sat before the old tape deck double tracking. Swapping her bike for a guitar at the tender age of ten was also an inspired decision.

Allan Wilkinson
Northern Sky