In February last year Red River Dialect played Cafe Oto as part of a cracking triple-bill with Thalia Zedek and Damon And Naomi. Thalia praised them from the stage and compared them to the late Robert Fisher’s Willard Grant Conspiracy which is high praise indeed. They’d just released the fabulous Broken Stay Open Sky but talking to singer and songwriter David Morris after the show it appeared he was planning an imminent retreat from the world for a spell in a monastery.
It transpires he didn’t leave for the nine-month meditation retreat at a remote Buddhist monastery on the cliffs of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia until later in the year. Before he went Red River Dialect recorded another record at Mwnci Studios in rural South-West Wales, and now Abundance Welcoming Ghosts is due out on 27th September on Paradise of Bachelors.
The first track to be shared from the album is ‘Snowdon’, featuring Joan Shelley, which weaves tales and tangled legends about Britain’s highest mountain.
David Morris goes into more detail about themes behind the song:
“The highest mountain in Wales is called Snowdon in English, deriving from the Old English for ‘snow hill’, whilst the older Welsh name Yr Wyddfa means ‘the barrow’ or ‘the tumulus’. It is said that this was derived over time from Gwyddfa Rhitta, ‘Rhitta’s Tomb’, because the giant Rhitta Gawr lays buried there having been slain by King Arthur; not before he had gobbled up all the local sheep, killed two dozen Welsh kings and had woven an immense cape from all of the beards he had shorn them of. I grew up a few miles from Tintagel Castle in Cornwall and have an abiding affection for claims that this was THE Camelot, and that Arthur and Merlin were clearly Cornish, and not from Wales, as other tales tell, and definitely not from Somerset. The truth is that I stole the heart of this song from some stones on the summit of Yr Wyddfa, but you’d have to have gone or go to know how.”
You can pre-order the album here, and the band is playing at the Servant Jazz Quarters in Dalston on 4th October (ticket link).
Bucketfull Of Brains 