‘The words rolling about your head for years, The clay of your face withering, The well of your sorrow is untapped, Hearts are heavy barricades exploding’ (An Ode To Heavy Water)

Cinder Well is the musical incarnation of California-based multi-instrumentalist, Amelia Baker.  Her songwriting fuses together two contrasting yet interlinked musical traditions – DIY folk-punk and traditional Celtic folk music.  The former influence stems from Baker’s membership of the anarcho-punk folk collective, Black Raum.  The latter emerged from that band’s collaborations with Lankum, which sparked her to move to County Clare and immerse herself in the Irish folk community.

The result of these experimentations is a mournfully elemental, eerily atmospheric dark folk that deftly infuses traditional folk arrangements with a momentum and resonance more akin to the more melancholic expressions of hardcore punk in the vein of say Dawn Ray’d or Morrow.  I first came across Cinder Well through her third full-length, 2020’s No Summer, an album that inspired Contraszt Records to reissue both of her earlier albums on vinyl for the first time – initially, her second album, 2018’s The Unconscious Echo, and now, on its 10^th anniversary, her self-titled debut.

As you might anticipate, this debut is tightly stripped back.  The sombrely brittle acoustic guitar forms a lockstep partnership with Baker’s captivating vocals, as they segue from spectral whispers to more stridently melodic assertions.  Further texture is added by the roiling piano of the title track, while the fiddle raucously fires The Hyde Mansion / Lonesome John, before imbuing a rather more melancholic accent to Fallen.  It is, perhaps, though the hauntingly beautiful The Little Box, The Colour Of Heartache, that best captures the very essence of Cinder Well as it escalates to its fiercely emotional climax.