Daphne's Flight - On Arrival (2020)

Three years on from their last studio album (with a live one appearing in the interim), Helen Watson, Julie Matthews, Chris While, Melanie Harrold and Christine Collister take to the wing again for another stylistically and thematically varied collection.

Watson’s first in to bat with Turn The Microphones Off, a vaguely African shuffle rhythm with While on darbuka that, opening in the Anthropocene and featuring a spoken passage midway, would appear to be a plea to tone down the noise of social media’s neural net so that “what’s said in the cave/Stays in the cave”. Next up, Matthews takes to the skies with Be Amelia. This shimmering and slightly jazzy fingerpicked number takes Amelia Earhart as encouragement of empowerment to young women to “stand on her bones and be extraordinary”.

Switching to more of a soulful gospel sound, Matthews on piano, Collister’s up next with You Got Me Going, a love song written a decade ago but only now finding its setting, the others providing refrain vocals as she builds to a molten climax. Harrold’s Rogue Rider sports the album title in its opening line and featuring just Dave Bowie Jr on sparse double bass that mirrors the vocal delivery about following and embracing your destiny and being a support to others.

Shifting again, a co-write between While and Charlie Dore, the five-minute Saturday With Mr Rameer skips around cascading chords in an ode to the liberating joys of Saturdays spent learning ballroom dancing. Another collaboration, this time between Watson and Howard Lees, featuring Matthews on keys and While on percussion, You’ll Never Go Away is a jazzy blues slink that again features a kind of scat spoken passage and which, according to her notes, relates to events of a romantic nature in 1968 as she opens with “I used to want to have a big talk with you boy…But I never had the words or the inclination to let those feelings show…you always had it turned full on…skating in a chemical state”, adding “give me a call, shy don’t you”.

Written with Watson, Hard To Be The Way is a faithful revisiting of the handclap percussion, a country-flavoured song from While and Matthews debut album, Piecework, back in 1997, here with some added keyboards colour then its back to airy jazzy blues for Collister’s So Brave, a love letter to her late father, the lyrics of which only came the day before recording. Harrold provides the penultimate track, another gospel-influenced number but with a more uptempo chorus, This Woman Today being a hymn to sisterhood, Matthews providing the last word with the albums only political number, the steady choppy rhythm and lap steel-backed That’s Just Life Around Here, the others’ voices interweaving behind her on a song about working hard to keep the wolf from the door, former industrial towns fallen into economic depression and “good people in difficult times”. A terrific example of sisters doing it for themselves in their own ways and on their own terms, an arrival well worth breaking out the greeting banners for.