Back in January, we wrote about Separate Lives by Fair Mothers, the project of Stonehaven’s Keith Allan. The album balanced “stark beauty with a kind of world weary self-deprecation,” we wrote of the record released on Edinburgh label Song, By Toad Records, “the tone […] plaintive yet not quite tortured, some small wick of amusement burning, no matter how black the humour.” The result was an album as curious as it was moving, painting an odd duality where every experience can break you or set you free.
The album was recorded at Edinburgh’s Happiness Hotel studio with Song, By Toad’s Matthew Young, as well as a cast of supporting musicians, and back then we mentioned how Separate Lives was only half of what emerged from those sessions. Far from being b-sides or off-cuts, the other songs formed their own LP, a sister record titled In Monochrome that in many ways builds upon and surpasses its sibling.
It’s worth once again stressing the collaborative nature of Fair Mothers. Through Esther Swift (harp), Sam Mallalieu (drums), Pete Harvey (cello), Faith Eliott and Dana Gavanski (both vocals), and Johnny Lynch and Faith Eliott (both screaming), Allan found ways to lift and expand his music, the supporting collective there not to merely reproduce his ideas but shape and enhance them. Young too played a role at this level, having a direct creative impact and arranging the various elements into their final shape. That the result is so moving, so personal to Allan, is a testament to the organic and intuitive nature of the whole experience.
Because In Monochrome is Keith Allan’s record. His most idiosyncratic, and his best, inspired by his own woes and joys and his particular fascinations. It is of little surprise that isolation is a key theme. The alienating fact that we are separate from one another, never quite able close the gap, and the small moments that reinforce or transcend it. “It was Camus that did for me,” Allan explains:
After I finished [The Stranger] and experiencing insomnia and hallucinations, I reached this total clarity where I knew that I was a separate entity from my body and this immediately blew quite a few fuses in me. I disappeared… and when I came back I knew that everything was connected, was really one thing, but at the same time was nothing and didn’t really exist separate from me. I didn’t know how this could be, or what I was, and above all, how could a boy from Fife possibly have this Zen experience?
This question lies at the heart of the Fair Mothers sound. The intuitive connection of disparate elements, the loneliness and the strange comfort, the kernel of irresolution at its core. In Monochrome feels like the most direct confrontation yet, delving further than ever into the dark and the strange, even if no answers are ever forthcoming. Opener ‘Magic Bullets for Dracula’ duly delivers, dreamily sluggish drums dragging everything forward with an undead lurch, the sad piano always on the verge of fading out into nothing beyond the ambient stillness of an empty room.
This combination of melancholic and eerie is woven into the fabric of the record, as is a grab bag of influences ranging from Neil Young and Stephen Malkmus to the haunted compositions of Prokofiev. Nowhere is this clearer than the sprawling ‘Birds and Bees and Tiny Fleas’. Opening with a wry pessimism that brings to mind Benjamin Shaw, the songs makes its bitterness clear with the repeated refrain of “we are mostly fucked,” before slowly morphing into a languid folk song that’s altogether more wistful. But you have to consider all of the elements to really appreciate what the track achieves. The foreboding guitar lines and peculiar modulated vocals, the near classical crescendos, the field recorded bird song, insect clamour and static-crackled radio transmissions. If the Fair Mothers style is a patchwork, then this is the track which finds it at its most intricate and seamless.
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The poltergeistic turmoil of ‘Harpy’ shivers with anger and regret, a demented quiet that plays out behind closed doors. There’s a Lynchian quality to the song, and indeed the record as a whole, as though the melancholy is a curtain behind which older things lurk, benevolent and malevolent both, ominous shapes that sometimes leave an impression through the fabric. ‘Unwinding Road’ is perhaps the most overt reference to these forms, a heartbroken piano ballad concerning the forces that compelled William S. Burroughs to kill his wife, as told in the aftermath. There’s no going back through the curtain, yet the other side is always just there, always moving.
“In Monochrome really signals a search to regain contact with feeling,” Allan says. A lean into the veil, an attempt to bury one’s face in the fabric if only to sense what moves beneath. The title track presents the experience in all of its bittersweet beauty, pressing through the numbing buffers of time and pain and cynicism to one ground zero amongst many. “The lyrics are the most honest of all on the record,” he says, concerning “the fiercest argument I had with my wife, where we had to face the potential ruin of our life together.” What is on the other side might not be good, to feel its presence in no way productive or healthy. But there is something there, and it is still moving.
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In Monochrome is out now via Song, By Toad Records and available now from their Bandcamp page.
