Not the catchiest of titles, this one, but,then again, I doubt that mainstream commercial success figures high on The Goblin Market's agenda.
Laura Weller and Jeff Kelly, who are still members of longstanding Seattle psychedelic rock band The Green Pajamas, fix their visions on a higher plain, with this album being the third of the pair's ongoing project to combine musical and literary passions.
Their name comes from a Christina Rossetti poem and their first album, Ghostland (2001), was mainly inspired by Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry.
Their sophomore release, Haunted (2005), explored themes from Joyce Carol Oate's 'gothic' stories.
Beneath The Gondal's Foreign Sky takes similarly ghostly cues from 19th century England and specifically from the poetry of the Bronte sisters.
With so little being known about the life of Emily Bronte, she has become a much mythologized and often sentimentalized symbol of Victorian romanticism.
The recent film version of Wuthering Heights directed by Andrea Arnold, presented a different perspective of her only novel by emphasising the harshness of the Yorkshire landscape and the brutality of the social conditions.
Weller and Kelly take a more ethereal approach to the literary sources dwelling on the gothic aspects that feature throughout the works Emily and her sisters.
They are fascinated with the strange and mysterious Emily who communes with the dark and wild forces of nature, is resigned to a lonely life of unfulfilled desire and who finds morbid solace in graveyards, as we hear in Remembrance ("All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee")
Five of Emily Bronte's poems are set to music and two (If This Be All and A Reminiscence) are based on poems by her younger sister Anne.
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The remaining tracks, all written by Kelly, use identical themes and structures; one for example takes its title from Emily's poem High Waving Heather and the title song refers to is her imaginary kingdom of Gondal wherein Kelly refers to Emily as the "mystic girl of the moor".
Laura Weller sings lead on just four of the twelve tracks and it is a pity we don't hear her more since her mournful vocals are so well suited to the plaintive tone of the songs. Jeff Kelly's equally delicate, even slightly androgynous, voice, doesn't jar but isn't such a perfect fit.
He does, however, sing on the best marriage of words and music, The Night Wind, one of Emily Bronte's poems which features the lines : "I said 'Go gentle singer', thy wooing voice is kind, but do not think its music, has power to reach my mind".
The musical backing, mainly of piano and acoustic guitar, is lilting and understated. In this celestial context, the occasional electric guitar takes on an unwelcome prog-rock character.
Ultimately, it's quite a pleasant record but the bleak yet airy quality of the songs stretched my patience for poetic torment and left me yearning for some glimpses of a down to earth reality by way of contrast.
The Goblin Market website
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