‘Far above the skylark sings, And beats the air with joyful wings, Till all the sky with music rings, At high noon of the day’ (Margaret L Robertson)

Shropshire’s Haress return with their third full-length album and follow-up to 2022’s Ghosts.  It is an album of remarkable emotional weight, a visceral ode to both our connections with place and the power of community.  It draws on The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, a fictionalised retelling of a collective of 19^th century weavers and land workers who mass forged coins in one of England’s most significant financial counterfeiting operations as they sought to protect their livelihoods from industrialised automation.

The album opens with Blood Moon, the guitar shimmering and trembling like an eerie early morning mist as it swirls relentlessly from primordial forests and sweeping valleys to tight city streets.  The track then locks into a haunting, groove-laden loop, occasional spectral howls only adding to the darkly foreboding atmosphere.  Waves of instrumentation – encompassing guitar, bow-played guitar, and subtly propulsive percussion – similarly shape King David and Coin Clippers as they are incrementally layered upon one another, ebbing and flowing between passages of meditative reflection and those of surging, hypnotic power.

It evokes a mesmerising sense of being guided through our island’s history from the Peterloo Massacre to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, from the 1926 General Strike to the social democratic moment forced in the aftermath of World War II, a legacy systematically squandered over the past forty years.  But a more hopeful tone, simmering with both optimism and defiance, emerges as the title track calls upon the folklore of the skylark, the harbinger of a new dawn.  The moment midway through where a sole voice kicks in with ‘Far above the skylarks sing’ is utterly spine-tingling and as the communal vocals join, it builds to a euphoric intensity that calls upon our past to resist the paucity of ambition that defines our present.