(2025) Patrick Wolf - Crying the Neck (CD edition) [FLAC]

       Patrick Wolf – Crying the Neck [CD edition] (2025)     





Review:

As the pandemic loomed over London in 2020, Patrick Wolf was living in a Lewisham tower block where he cut the desolate figure of the Arthurian Fisher King. A wounded protector surveying his barren kingdom, gripping onto the Holy Grail of his voice as he drank himself into oblivion. Neither alive nor dead, a man very firmly on the edge. Twenty years before, when Wolf first emerged, he was seen as the next break-out star alongside Amy Winehouse. His first two albums Lycanthropy and Wind in the Wire were an almighty deluge of high-octane ed-up acid folk, cut with a classically trained balladry that absorbed a cosmos of instruments and was supremely suffused by Wolf’s baritone. Others elsewhere such as Animal Collective may have been playing with the same millennial paradox of sacred and electronic, ritual and replay, but Wolf’s sound had a personal and spiritual velocity to it that made it feel dangerous. The fact Wolf was also a recalcitrant figure ratcheted up his appeal further. Young and laser-focused, he stood at odds with the major labels and rejected demands to change his unconventional sound to produce something more consistently radio-friendly – in particular during the recording of 2007’s major-label debut The Magic Position. Wolf always felt on the cusp of something until all of a sudden he never felt further away from it. After a run of six albums in eight years that ranged from well-received to acclaimed, he dropped off the map in 2012. Since then rumours of a return have faded in and out of the very real reports of the tragic events that have befallen him in the interim. For more than a decade: death, bankruptcy, and addiction were all we heard, until Wolf re-emerged in 2023. He had found sobriety during the pandemic and left his Lewisham flat to seek peace in east Kent. A salt-scented place of glorious landscape and deep spiritual resonance – but also the genius loci of this Kingdom’s madness. Wolf deeply immersed himself in Kent’s landscape, histories, and rituals. He took day-long peregrinations along the coastline. He devoured all the pamphlets from the local historical association. He consulted folklore experts to better understand rituals. It was almost like a ceremonial forgetting of London. And it’s from this absorption that his first album in thirteen years Crying The Neck is born. Monumental opener ‘Reculver’ sets the tone, played out across a complicated but melodious set of three time-signatures. The track, whose rough form was conceived when Wolf was 16 and completed over two decades later, unifies his years of pain, when he was “bankrupt and borderline / orphaned and obsolete” with his later salvation where he was able “to find all the words”. In a duality that mirrors Reculver’s twin towers near Herne Bay, it feels like a cleansing of Wolf’s decade of silence – the bridging of a supposed ‘lost’ period. However, it’s also haunted by a spectre, one that pervades the entire record: the fractured psyche of Kent. Kent is ritual and landscape, but also the frontline of Brexit-Britain. Its place name, one of the oldest in the English language, also serves as its function – for Kent translates roughly as ‘land on the edge’. Wolf becomes the latest in a long list of radical artists to have their imagination overtaken by the unknowable depths of Kent’s subconscious, joining author Russell Hoban who wrote Riddley Walker about it, Charles Dickens who set his final work The Mystery of Edwin Drood there, and David Seabrook who wrote All The Devils Are Here, a deep psychogeographic work concerning east Kent. The album’s staggered triptych of songs (‘Limbo’ / ‘The Last of England’ / ‘Hymn of the Haar’) that concern the tortured side of Kent is its mythic spine. ‘The Last of England’, in particular, a clear tribute to Wolf’s long-term inspiration Derek Jarman, pulls no punches. It’s a grand rhapsodic track that Wolf calls “a National Anthem that I wrote for myself”. Here he mixes Arthurian legend with Boris bull, singing how “The Green King deep in Doggerland woke” to find a country “rotten to the core” by that “madness in June”. Under a sky of soft starlight keys, it’s a reminder of how deep rituals of the land can be transformed into empty political motions. Kent’s current crisis-state is most tragically captured in harrowing ‘Hymn of the Haar’. In it Wolf recounts seeing a dead migrant boy “the shape of a balloon” washed up under the Dover cliffs, where it “came clear there was no rousing him”. Like the boy, who Wolf initially assumed was asleep, the song is locked in an eternal dreaming. However, the genius of Crying the Neck is the nesting of Wolf within the county. For this record is far from soapboxing. It is a simple absorption and accountability of what has transpired. Much as Wolf himself has moved on from his string of tragedies to create something beautiful, what fuels this record is the belief that this is possible on a grander scale. — Quietus



This CD edition comes, after a moments silence, with three “instrumental” versions chosen by Patrick as works of composition and string arrangement that he felt needed to be heard alongside the album song versions, ‘The Curfew Bell’ and ‘Lughnasa’ heard here composed and recorded as one piece of music in it’s sprawling multiple time signatures and keys and the backing to ‘Foreland’ composed as a duet between two string quartets.







   





Track List:

01. Reculver

02. Limbo (feat. Zola Jesus)

03. The Last of England

04. Jupiter

05. On Your Side

06. Oozlum

07. Dies Irae

08. The Curfew Bell

09. Lughnasa (feat. Serafina Steer)

10. Song of the Scythe

11. Better or Worse

12. Hymn of the Haar

13. Foreland

14. [silence]

15. The Curfew Bell + Lughnasa (Instrumental)

16. Foreland (Instrumental)





Media Report:

Genre: art pop, chamber pop

Origin: London, England, UK  

Format: FLAC

Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec

Bit rate mode: Variable

Channel(s): 2 channels

Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz

Bit depth: 16 bits

Compression mode: Lossless

Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)





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