Allysen Callery - Ghost Folk (2020)

Allysen Callery’s a songwriter and (self-taught) guitarist from Rhode Island who produces what she herself terms “quiet music for a loud world”, and what’s latterly been dubbed by others “ghost folk”. Certainly the latter tag can seem particularly accurate, in that Allysen’s music often seems familiar from somewhere you can’t quite place, the ghost of a song you might know perhaps, and also in that she sings almost exclusively in a tender, hushed tone, if not exactly pianissimo. However, this doesn’t mean her music lacks expression, or that her writing lacks substance. Her music doesn’t need to shout or force an entry into your mind; it casts its oblique spell without overwhelming the sound picture.

The sequence of the disc is akin to a song-cycle of sorts. It opens with the arresting nightmarish seductiveness of Beautiful Teeth (with overtones of Reynardine perhaps), then voices a different kind of tempting sensuality on I Can’t See You. The more earthbound language of Sea Change brings a phase of reflection, which continues into the barely concealed puzzlement of Tarot Card. The striking imagery of Fair Warning then returns us to the theme of beautiful things that are full of poison and then comes an eastern-influenced guitar instrumental interlude, In Your Perfumed Chambers.

The next track is a song entitled November Man. Significantly, Allysen has dedicated the album to “the November Man, Nick Drake” (with whom she feels a loner kinship), “and to all the quiet ones”. And certainly, despite the Sandy Denny-like nature of this key song’s melodic contours, the spirit of Nick Drake could be said to audibly pervade the whole record, and its defining character as “ghost folk” is reflected in the comparably elusive, slightly intangible and sometimes apparently “not quite present” nature of the invention. Even so, Allysen’s lyrics explore a more directly personal autobiography, one which she candidly describes thus: “I’d say I had a growth period following the loss of someone I thought was a good friend, we had been very close, and there are several stages of grief & then acceptance”. Perhaps this admission more directly informs Allysen’s bustling cover of Anne Briggs’ song Go Your Way, which proves an ideal thematic companion for her own composition Elemental Child while effectively introducing the final pair of songs, the painfully honest I Remember Everything and the delicately bluesy (and rather Jansch-like) Our Lady Of The Highway. Tucked in just after November Man is the album’s other cover, an interestingly beguiling, if perhaps ultimately unsettling, take on the enigmatic traditional number Katie Cruel.

Ghost Folk casts a mesmerising spell, impossible to resist, and yet also conjures subtleties and substance that demand your closer investigation (you need to give it more than its purely linear time to make its mark). Since, for all the shape-shifting nature of the music, there’s a discrete, and consistent, quality to the sound-world Allysen inhabits.