Sliding from surrealism to sedition, William Darts looks at new music from the exotically named Mega Bog and Lula Wiles.
Lula Wiles Photo: 2019 Laura E. Partain, ex Lula Wiles website
Mega Bog’s new album, titled Life, and Another, came to me with a press release that might well have been expressly written to whet the appetite of this and other survivors of the late sixties.
Boldly claiming that we were in for another fantastical off-world transmission from this woman, we were advised to prepare ourselves for the most sophisticated, exploratory and accessible statement yet from this surrealist songwriter and avant-garde prospector.
What’s more, it continued, this enigmatically titled album comes with a vibrant cast of players, and bristles with painterly technicolour surface textures while all the time plumbing fathomless depths of feeling.
Well, I thought, with a slight cynical crinkling of the brow, it sounds as if this release has a lot to live up to, but I was certainly transported to some sort of Tranceville.
The three women of Lula Wiles have taken a little more time to create their own niche in my listening life, although my interest was certainly recharged when I recently saw them described as “provocateurs of the best kind” and “rabble-rousers with the purest intentions”.
Somehow this didn’t quite fit in with the very real charm of their debut album five years ago. The trio’s early exposure at the Newport and Philadelphia Folk Festivals had given them the following they’d been looking for and defined the sound that we heard back in 2016. This was a collection too easily sidelined in the overflow of alt.country albums at the time. But, when Isa Burke sang her song 'Travelling On', there’s no doubt that you were listening to a beautifully poised and clear-eyed account of a relationship on the rise and then on the wane, played out on a road trip, clearly set in the direction of Nashville.
Lulu Wiles' new album, Shame and Sedition, was yet another lockdown project, recorded in their home state of Maine in a farmhouse converted into a studio. A strange approach, Isa Burke remembers, but one that yielded some "really cool stuff" as she puts it.
Well, cool it may be, but it’s also confrontational, with a palpable seriousness that’s something new for the trio. A seriousness in both in what they’re singing and in how they’re singing it.
Music Details
ARTIST: Mega Bog
TITLE: Flower
ALBUM: Life, And Another
COMPOSER: Birgy
LABEL: Paradise of Bachelors
ARTIST: Mega Bog
TITLE: Obsidian Lizard
ALBUM: Life, And Another
COMPOSER: Birgy, Otheim
LABEL: Paradise of Bachelors
ARTIST: Mega Bog
TITLE: Before A Black Tea
ALBUM: Life, And Another
COMPOSER: Birgy
LABEL: Paradise of Bachelors
ARTIST: Mega Bog
TITLE: Crumb Back
ALBUM: Life, And Another
COMPOSER: Birgy
LABEL: Paradise of Bachelors
ARTIST: Lula Wiles
TITLE: Traveling On
ALBUM: Lula Wiles
COMPOSER: Burke
LABEL: Lula Wiles
ARTIST: Lula Wiles
TITLE: It's Cool (We're Cool, Everything's Cool)
ALBUM: Single
COMPOSER: Burke
LABEL: Smithsonian Folkways
ARTIST: Lula Wiles
TITLE: In Dreams
ALBUM: Shame and Sedition
COMPOSER: Obomsawin
LABEL: Smithsonian Folkways
ARTIST: Lula Wiles
TITLE: Oh My God
ALBUM: Shame and Sedition
COMPOSER: Burke
LABEL: Smithsonian Folkways
ARTIST: Lula Wiles
TITLE: Everybody (Connected)
ALBUM: Shame and Sedition
COMPOSER: Obomsawin
LABEL: Smithsonian Folkways
