Over two previous albums, Brighton band Bird in the Belly have cut a distinctive course, allying musical innovation with the exhumation of obscure songs and overlooked texts, usually with a dark undercurrent of social commentary: Newgate hangings, 19th-century sex work and the like. After the City delves further into antique gloom, being a concept album steeped in pandemic and desolation, complete with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, though the mood and music prove dramatic rather than depressing. Its principal inspiration is the Victorian author Richard Jefferies, celebrated for his nature writings and dystopian novel After London, though the group also draw from the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Nashe and poems lamenting the poverty wrought by the Lancashire cotton famine of the 1860s.
Blessed with a couple of multi-instrumentalists, the quartet navigate such unpromising material with flair, mixing lively acoustic folk-rock – opener Tragic Hearts of Towns, for example – with desolate pastoral pieces such as Pale Horse. In Ben Webb and Laura Ward they have two powerful singers, the former’s gravelly tones contrasting and blending with Ward’s clear, melodic voice, which can handle a piece like Smokeless Chimneys pretty much solo. In a culture steeped in dystopias, do we need another? Apparently so. An album of well-realised ambition.
