Edgar Hurley: The Blame Needs A Place

- Loss is a part of life. Edgar Hurley seems to know this implicitly, there’s a sensation of being worn down, beaten even, that pervades his folk vignettes. “You’ll take just what you need” is how he greets us on The Blame Needs A Place. It’s less an accusation and more an acceptance. This is an old soul, one whose fought the battle and lost, only looking to salvage something from the fragments: “You’ll take just what you keep / I’ll go up the mountain / If you promise to love me.”

Like the folkways music of old, there’s dark things lingering in the couplets and simple, melodic  charm of this record. Jordan Wearn puts on the Edgar Hurley moniker like a pagan mask, to caper through some grim fables. The unease makes its presence felt regularly, like on Hurrah! It’s only two songs in, but Hurley is already greeting the angel of death when he sings “...we danced a little / He took me under his sickle / Said death won’t wait another day … Hurrah! / My time has come.”

These self-conscious oddities are reminiscent of Aldous Harding, whose wilfully weird spirit is an anarchic force in folk music, one that I know Wearn is a fan of. Still, it seems like he sows his strange cloth from a variety of threads. The freak folk of the noughties is an obvious antecedent: I get especially strong Devendra Banhart vibes from the latin shuffle of Sharing. The folk revival of the ‘60s is the bedrock which much of Blame makes its foundation, be it Nick Drake or Simon And Garfunkel. Hurley takes in more of the mid-twentieth century than that, however, because there’s quite a strong country twang, like on single Sometimes. I don’t know if it’s something he would hear, but with the fey folk and psych rolled in I’m often reminded of Lee Hazelwood’s work. See for example the ASMR sibilance of Apple Tree where Wearn croons with a delightful dementedness about “A fruit based love".

Not every song is dark, some are just pleasantly off-the-wall. It’s very easy to like that queer-cowboy anthem, Sometimes, as Wearn croons (presumably from the saddle), “Of all of my men / I loved him the most.” Sometimes Hurley can even be just simple and effective, like on  the bittersweet duet with Selita Labuka, I Know Places. Although even here there’s traces of lyrical nuttery, as they serenade each other with earnest melancholy about how love their love is like dropping a never-ending party favour.

As the record progresses, however, the memento mori start crowding in like a dark wood. Loss is endemic on the back half of Blame. There are more generic themes of heartbreak like on What’s Not Mine where Wearn cries his regret: “what I lost / A kindness so divine / And now it’s not mine.” These rub shoulders with that returning specter of death on At Last. Wearn again invokes the reaper, singing “Now all the years are changing / And we’ll all finally die / And all the love that binded us / We will finally lay down.”

It gets very stark and bare as the truth wrings the energy out of everything. The xylophones, synths and horns which prettied up even the darkest moments earlier on are long gone as Hurley murmurs still more bitter regret on Home Recording: “I am torn at the waistline I am worn on the hip / The flask it is empty / You drank your whole fill” before uttering a long, reverberant howl.

Despite such cruel heartbreak, I get the feeling that Wearn might unload much of the guilt of The Blame Needs A Place at his own feet. Yet who can really say? Both the sound and the sadness of this record are faded like a sepia tone photograph. Perhaps it’s long enough ago that the sharpness of the recriminations have faded. One day all that will remain is the gentle worn down sweetness, of memories not clearly recalled and of the music.

- Chris Cobcroft.