With their third album, Haress join that rare class of bands that can honestly be described as elemental. While the tangled roots of their sound can be traced back to folk, post-rock, ambient and the more literate, gently arcane fringes of indie rock (Arbouretum, Daniel Higgs, All Structures Align), Skylarks places them at a juncture that’s hard to either pinpoint or entirely fathom.
Comprising four tracks, the album stretches and sprawls in a manner that might initially be described as ‘meandering’ – until, that is, you realise just how much intensity of purpose dwells within. Motifs are half-started, seemingly forgotten and then later reclaimed, themes rippling outward like tall tales that slowly change form as they’re passed through successive generations.
‘Blood Moon’ opens with a scratch and a scrabble, shimmers and groans making way for spidering arpeggios and the kind of odd, left-of-centre structural choices you might associate with Enablers – a band who are both labelmates and adoptive family for Haress. ‘King David’ follows with a slow nod that’s both cyclic insistent, finding itself somewhere between the mesmeric thrum of Lungfish and Steeleye Span’s take on ‘When I Was On Horseback’ before closing out on a rusty creak – perhaps the sound of a scythe being sharpened, or simply a battered pub sign swaying unsteadily in the evening breeze.
‘Coin Clippers’ offers a brief, burnished but nonetheless courtly interlude before things close out on the album’s stunning title track. Clocking in at an all-too-brief fouteen minutes, ‘Skylarks’ feels almost like it could have been spun from morning light. Guitar parts tumble and drip, and the choral vocals dip in and out of earshot as though they’re being heard across fields come harvest time, intoning a melody that seems innately familiar.
While the music is deft and undeniably beautiful, the album’s success is the result of something far more ineffable. Often bands exploring folk or folklore can tip into trite pastiche, leaning on either hey-nonny-nonny tweeness or try-hard Wicker Man weirdness. Haress, instead, are matter-of-fact when it comes to their connection with landscape, place and folklore. It seems woven into their day-to-day rather than something donned as part of a performance, the product of a life being lived in the here and now rather than a timid exercise in nostalgia. Skylarks feels old, yes, but also incredibly alive.
With 2022’s brilliant Ghosts the band took us by the hand and led us through overgrown passageways dense with dew-laden cobwebs and lank sticky tendrils. Here they have moved out into light, open space and make good on the collective noun for the songbird they’ve chosen as their album’s avatar: an exaltation.
