Music Monday: The Magnetic North’s Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North

I’m a social introvert, in that I can be social, but I’m an introvert. I can engage socially. I can be, I suppose, almost charming. But I am happiest when there is distance. My family and me somehow remote. On an island, literally or figuratively.

The name for this is islaphilia, the need for remoteness.

It’s this pull that draws me to mountains and wastes and separated almost liminal places, like the Holy Island of Lindisfarne off the northeastern coast of Britain, which is only connected to the main at low tide, or the Faroe Islands – I’ve not yet been – or, similarly, Orkney.

And this is where we intersect with this week’s Music Monday topic: The Magnetic North’s 2012 debut album Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North, a beautiful homage to the archipelago that also manages to be a suite of wonderful folk-, pop- and rock-adjacent songs.

The album begins with “Stromness;” distant trombones stand in for fog horns and Hannah Peel’s wordless vocals rise and fall and roslove with an undertone of unfinishedness.

Unfortunately, i can’t embed individual tracks so here’s the whole thing:

This is followed by the first song proper, “Bay of Skaill.” Here is a sense of arrival, or arrival soon. Erland Cooper, who contributes vocals and bass, grew up on Orkney and the complicated relationship with his home is heavy.

It’s all there

Comin’ in like an arrow

Comin’ up over the sea

 

It’s all there

Shutting up for the season

It’s not why I’m here

 

Every little thing I have

Sitting up by the isle

See it with tired eyes

The tune has, simultaneously, a sun-faded nostalgia for home and a deep knowledge of what a holiday paradise is like in the off-season, when it’s just the locals and all the spaces built to contain the seasonal masses are thinly populated by locals.

The sense of excitement, provided by the summertime visitors or the opportunities of Britain, London over the water to the south, drives the next track, “Hi Life.”

The fourth track is the heart of the album, “Betty Corgiall.” Corigall, a young woman who fell in love with a visiting sailor who then abandoned her leading her to take her own life by throwing herself from a cliff into the sea, and who was thus buried in unhallowed ground, visited Cooper in a dream and asked him to tell her story, thus inspiring the album.

It’s a heartbreaking song, and quite possibly my favorite on the album.

The album continues with the complex nostalgia of “Warbeth” and “Rackwick” before settling into the stately frame of “Old Man of Hoy” and then into the poignant “Netherton’s Teeth,” the lyrics to which are adapted from Edwin Muir’s poem “The Brothers.”

Last night I watched my brothers play,

The reckless and the gentle one,

In a field two yards away.

For half a century they were gone

Beyond the other side of care

Even in a dream how could I dare

Interrogate that happiness

So wildly spent yet never less?

For still they raced about the green

Yet where I was they once had been.

 

I thought, How could I be so dull,

Twenty thousand days ago,

Not to see the beauty there?

I asked them, Were they always so

As you are now, that other day?

 

For then we played for victory

And not to make each other glad.

A darkness covered every head,

And frowns that twisted every face,

And through that mask we could not see

Your grace

 

Even in a dream how could I dare

Interrogate that happiness

So wildly spent yet never less?

For still they raced about the green

Just like two revolving suns;

So strong I could not see their eyes

Or look into their paradise.

 

Yet where I was they once had been

 

I have observed in foolish awe

The dateless mid-days of the law

And seen indifferent justice done

By everyone on everyone.

And in a vision I have seen

My brothers playing on the green.

If the album had already not, the songs after “Netherton’s Teeth” have transitions from tracks or songs to movements. They lead, they provoke, they inspire, they counter what comes before and after them. The interplay between Peel’s, Cooper’s and guitarist Simon Tong’s playing creates a frame for the songwriting as cohesive as it is expansive as it plays upon its theme. The juxtaposition of sampled and organic sounds is so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable, unless one is listening very closely or has been tipped off to it by some sipshit wag on the internet that brought you to it.

The last two songs, “Orphir” and “Yesnaby” are fitting consolidations of the themes of the album, being Betty Corrigall and the Orkney archipelago.

In my head, I just need a place to go

No more sorrow, no more violence

And with a great thud they are done.

Their follow-up album wasn’t too shabby, either.

Enjoyed what you’ve read this far? Check out the short film that accompanied the album.