Review: Cinder Well, Cafe Kino – ‘The most astonishing, visceral live experience’

Storytellers need contrast. There needs to be hope in the hurt and light in the dark. There needs to be warmth in the iciest of places.

Amelia Baker is dark-folk singer songwriter Cinder Well and contrast was all around her in Bristol’s Cafe Kino.

For an artist that is able to conjure the most barren, blasted landscapes it was really, really hot in this subterranean room.

Where her songs, so often, reach across oceans – from her native California to her adopted home on the West Coast of Ireland – it was stifling, claustrophobic, breathless.

Partly this was down to the amount of people crammed in, desperate to hear Baker’s remarkable voice. Partly it was because, as she sang, the air was sucked from the room as a stillness settled.

Two Heads, Grey Mare is taken from her recent album, Cadence, it is a song full of shadows, a complex soundscape built around a gently strummed guitar and the spooky creaks of Maria Schmidt’s violin.

Baker’s voice is high, restrained yet blessed with such incredible power and clarity. She holds the slowly melting audience rapt, struggling for breath.

On Overgrown she reveals her poetic soul, starlings burst the bleeding sun, metaphors, images tumble into a chorus that is childishly sing-along. The contrast is overwhelming.

There is more bird imagery in A Scorched Lament, more super-slow evocations of the end of the world. When it’s just Baker and her guitar the effect is simply devastating, it seems so hard to imagine that this world is built by one real, living person and a guitar.

This feels like the music that should be whispered to you by ghosts. When Schmidt adds her violin the two descend into a wonky, disquiet jig.

Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada added gorgeous string parts to the album tracks on Cadence and, often, it is those Dublin-based heroes that come to mind whilst watching Cinder Well.

That’s not to say that she shares their relentless heaviness, nor their pioneering distortion of the old ways. It’s more the atmosphere that she conveys. Crow is beautifully bleak and busted, a scorched earth thing.

Her voice floors us with emotion whilst the music is incredibly spare, devastatingly sparse. The violin creates a swirling hellscape, it’s Goth-folk vivid.

There would be no contrast, however, if everything was so dark.

Returning could be classic 70s, Laurel Canyon loveliness with a chorus that hums over treetops. Instead of recalling blackened earth this one is lush and green. A sense of timeless Americana settles across this overheated room.

The title track of the album has a similar ability to exist in every time, every space. It hums and buzzes, Baker’s occasionally wordless song exploring wider emotions than a thousand dreadful poets.

She says more with a gently plucked string than a hundred noisy symphonies. This is a world where darkness is embraced but there are tiny cracks where the sunlight is allowed through.

By the end, all wounds have all been healed, hope has overtaken hurt as Cinder Well closes with I Will Close in the Moonlight.

This is Americana-flecked, Baker’s voice finally succumbing to the Country sunshine as it is pitted against shadow-y stringed echoes.

Her deliciously dark folk music gently takes the hand of her sun-bleached Country and, together, create one of the most astonishing, visceral live experiences that you’re likely to see. Cinder Well are quietly devastating.

After the darkness there is the haze of the morning. After the oppressive heat comes the cool of a new day.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• The Schmoozenbergs, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘The good times never stop’
• Review: Half Man, Half Biscuit, SWX – ‘Filled with sweat, punk rock and a sense of community’
• Review: The Black Feathers, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘The only intoxicant people need’

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