RED RIVER DIALECT: ABUNDANCE WELCOMING GHOSTS (PoB-046)

Sumer is icumen in, and Red River Dialect have returned with their anticipated, ambitious new album Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, out September 27, 2019. Recorded in rural Southwest Wales shortly before songwriter and singer David Morris moved to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, their fifth album captures the band finding fresh joy in their music, relaxing more deeply into a natural, playful confidence: tangling with the thickets, wading in the river, digging the peat, and disappearing into the mountains. 

Pre-Order Abundance Welcoming Ghosts

$9.00 – $31.00

Or support via:  Bandcamp  (all formats/UK shipping) |  Other Options (physical/digital/int’l) | Local Stores  

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvG8A_iobNA&list=PLGLGDT-9ZI4IEE4yMsT473IPZSCBB0LzG]

You can listen to the lead single “Snowdon” (featuring Joan Shelley), which weaves tales and tangled legends about Wales’s highest mountain: “This is the closest point in Wales to heaven / The closest point to heaven in Wales.” 

Clash premiered the track, writing: “Red River Dialect have always ploughed their own furrow, with each album taking them to deeper and deeper levels, far beneath the soil. A rich, fulsome, lyrical experience, Abundance Welcoming Ghosts finds the band’s ragged, intense Americana rooted in the weight of history, with each song feeling torn from Victorian newspaper reports.”

• Deluxe LP edition features 140g vinyl; heavy-duty board jacket; insert with lyrics; color LP labels; and high-res Bandcamp download code.
• Deluxe ghost-white vinyl LP edition is limited to 600 copies.
• CD edition features gatefold board jacket with LP replica art.

[youtube https://youtu.be/MvG8A_iobNA]

Use coupon code GHOSTS during checkout through Sept. 27 for 40% off Red River Dialect’s prior album Broken Stay Open Sky.

Use Coupon Code GHOSTS for 40% Off “Broken Stay Open Sky”

Same Deal, but via Bandcamp

$9.00 – $30.00

Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the September 27, 2019 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “Snowdon.” For digital-only or UK preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

ACCLAIM FOR RED RIVER DIALECT

The band stretches out a rhapsodic melody like a ribbon chasing the wind. –  NPR

Thoughtful compositions that mix straightforward observation with naturalistic imagery and philosophical inquiry. – Uncut

Beatific [but] thrillingly combustible. Morris’s earnest tones crack with loss. A rare British treasure. – MOJO

Frenzied and fantastic… a radical, thundering realm [of[ sweeping, massive songs that incorporate old world folk and the tension of noise and drone music with equal force. – UPROXX

An album of breathtakingly rare beauty. A classic in every sense. – Echoes and Dust

A beguilingly atmospheric record… imagine Steve Gunn transplanted to Kernow and you’d be close. – Clash Music

Brimming with glorious dizzying energy and tension, primitive and cut loose from modern constraints. Impossible to resist. – Folk Radio UK

RIYL: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Magnolia Electric Co., Talk Talk, Patti Smith, Fairport Convention, PJ Harvey, Mighty Baby, Low, Jackie Leven, Tindersticks, James Elkington, Steve Gunn, The Weather Station

Morris goes into more detail below about the personal and Arthurian themes behind the song “Snowdon“:

The highest mountain in Wales is called Snowdon in English, deriving from the Old English for ‘snow hill’, whilst the older Welsh name Yr Wyddfa means “the barrow” or “the tumulus”. It is said that this was derived over time from Gwyddfa Rhitta, “Rhitta’s Tomb”, because the giant Rhitta Gawr lays buried there having been slain by King Arthur; not before he had gobbled up all the local sheep, killed two dozen Welsh kings and had woven an immense cape from all of the beards he had shorn them of. I grew up a few miles from Tintagel Castle in Cornwall and have an abiding affection for claims that this was THE Camelot, and that Arthur and Merlin were clearly Cornish, and not from Wales, as other tales tell, and definitely not from Somerset.

Our last record showed Gull Rock on the cover, the next island south west from the Tintagel Castle promontory along the north Cornwall coast. It’s not a long walk between the two and it comes recommended, two thumbs up. The whimsical Arthurian tat sold in the gift shops of all the former Camelots may have affected me more than I had previously reckoned, as I seem to be on their trail. So Arthur killed a giant, proving he was a king of course, but what happens when the idea of a king is slain? If I killed my idea of a giant-king what does that make me? What is the summit when you reach it and should you stand on a tomb? I continue to think of heaven as the sky, and I wonder if I may be hiding a crown, above or below.  

There was another verse to this song, now cut, which had a lyric about the ‘rack and pinion train’ upon which you can ride to the visitor centre near the summit where you can buy scones, key-rings and Arthurian tat (probably). It roughly follows the Llanberis Path, the longest, broadest and easiest of the six different ways to reach the summit. The Miners Track and the Pyg Track are most familiar to me, whilst the Rhyd Dhu and Snowdon Ranger paths have so far exceeded my confidence, threading along the crest of sharp ridges. I have become interested in my fear of heights, in how it feels when the vertigo comes on and where my mind goes. It goes to pieces! And my body turns to hot electric jelly. But I come back and try to keep going, or at least get myself far enough into the situation so that the turning back is just as scary. Even when the path is wide enough for children and small dogs to be skipping past me, I feel like I am on a tightrope and often crawl.

I have wondered if this is related to other ways that I engage with my life, whether this giddiness is pinning me to a narrow view, when the path of life is open and wide if I could only let go of the seeming safety of a tighter view. I recently read ‘On the Black Hill’, by Bruce Chatwin, which tells the story of the lives of two twins, spanning the first eighty years of the 20thcentury, as they live out their lives on a farm which straddles the Welsh-English border. It was from this book that I learned of the biblical ‘broad and narrow way’, found in the book of Matthew. Briefly, it encourages you to follow the narrow way and do exactly what the Bible tells you to do, for the broad and open way leads to the wide gate of destruction. This is the opposite of the conclusion I was coming to on Snowdon, by which I don’t mean the hedonism of Rhitta Gawr, at least not yet…

The Afanc is a water-serpent from Welsh mythology, described variously as resembling a crocodile, beaver or dwarf-like creature, and is sometimes said to be a demon. Another tale links the Afanc with the lake at the foot of Snowdon, and that it was eventually killed by… you guessed it, King Arthur. I have always been rooting for the dragons and snakes in old stories, and they don’t fare well in either the Christian or Pagan mythologies. I am happy to have moved on from these ways, and to have had the chance to encounter the tales from elsewhere in which serpents and dragons hold wisdom in the depths of the oceans and beyond the skies. The truth is that I stole the heart of this song from some stones on the summit of Yr Wyddfa, but you’d have to have gone or go to know how.

– David Morris