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Rating: Folk between rigorous Anglo-American tradition and jazz experimentation: this is Cruel Sister (1970), the fourth album by Pentangle, founded in 1967 by the Scotsman Bert Jansch and the Englishman John Renbourn, to which the extraordinary vocalist Jaqui McShee and jazz musicians Danny Thompson and Terry Cox would join. If the previous work, the excellent Basket of Light, is the group's greatest success and probably their milestone, Cruel Sister seals their full creative, stylistic, and especially technical maturity. The Pentangle throw open the doors to jazz, while maintaining a moderate inclination towards acid blues. Instruments such as the dulcitone and sitar are used, and the electric guitar is introduced for the first time, a pleasant and sudden twist since it was customary for the band to rely only on acoustic instruments, a decidedly unconventional choice for that era of frantic electricity.
Acoustic ballads taken from the traditional English, Scottish, and American repertoire compose the first part of the album, ancient songs that invoke stories of love and death, ordinary everyday life, epic texts, sometimes gruesome and dark. And Jaqui McShee gives her best, her sweet and crystalline voice, incredibly in tune and confident, is a serene source of pleasure for the ears and fragrant balm for restless hearts and minds, a true prima donna in all the tracks, also engaged in a solo a cappella singing.
But it is in the second part of Cruel Sister that the group showcases all its creativity and skill. With "Jack Orion" (of which there are three different versions) it can be said that the Pentangle reach that peak that many folk-rock groups of the time probably only dreamed of touching. "Jack Orion" is a suite of about 18 minutes, divided into 3 parts, that reprises a folk song; it talks about a musician, music and its magical influence, and a fatal case of mistaken identity. Delightful arpeggios, the voices of Jaqui and Jansch chasing each other in obsessive chants, drums and bass with a decidedly swing rhythm characterize the first and third sections, while the excellent central part is introduced by the dreamy and melancholic clear sound of the dulcimer, vibrant, ethereal, and delicate, masterfully accompanied by a lively Danny Thompson on the double bass, only to explode into acidic electric distortions, to whose listening it's hard not to go into ecstasies, a phenomenal jam of rare technique and mastery.
In conclusion, Cruel Sister is an album excellently played and stylistically original, and it can only be reproached for a certain repetitiveness in the first part; but this is the typical case where it's not the "what" but the "how" that matters, the point is not the lyrical aspect, therefore, but how the tracks are (divinely) performed.
Terry Cox: Drums, Percussions, Tambourine, Dulcitone, Triangle
Bert Jansch: Guitar, Vocals, Concertina, Dulcimer
Jacqui McShee: Vocals
John Renbourn: Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Sitar, Vocals
Danny Thompson: Double Bass
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
03 Lord Franklin (03:24)
It was homeward bound one night on the deep
Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.
With one hundred seamen he sailed away
To the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek a passage around the pole
Where we poor seamen do sometimes go.
Through cruel hardships they mainly strove
Their ship on mountains of ice was drove
Only the Eskimo with his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through.
In Baffin's Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Lord Franklin along with his sailors do dwell.
And now my burden it gives me pain,
For my long lost Franklin I'd cross the main
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To say on earth that my Franklin do live.
04 Cruel Sister (07:03)
There lived a lady by the North Sea shore
(Lay the bent to the bonnie broom)
Two daughters were the babes she bore
(Fa la la la la la la la la la)
As one grew bright as is the sun,
So coal black grew the elder one.
A knight came riding to the lady's door,
He'd travelled far to be their wooer.
He courted one with gloves and rings,
But he loved the other above all things.
Oh sister will you go with me
To watch the ships sail on the sea?
She took her sister by the hand
And led her down to the North Sea strand.
And as they stood on the windy shore
The dark girl threw her sister o'er.
Sometimes she sank, sometimes she swam,
Crying, "Sister, reach to me your hand!
"Oh Sister, Sister, let me live,
And all that's mine I'll surely give."
"(It's) your own true love that I'll have and more,
But thou shalt never come ashore."
And there she floated like a swan,
The salt sea bore her body on.
Two minstrels walked along the strand
And saw the maiden float to land.
They made a harp of her breastbone,
Whose sound would melt a heart of stone.
They took three locks of her yellow hair,
And with them strung the harp so rare.
They went into her father's hall
To play the harp before them all,
But when they laid it on a stone
The harp began to play alone.
The first string sang a doleful sound:
"The bride her younger sister drowned."
The second string as that they tried,
In terror sits the black-haired bride.
The third string sang beneath their bow,
"And surely now her tears will flow."
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