Before I’d even stuck their debut EP into the changer, I was predisposed to like The Yarns. Having rescued December’s Winter Warmer festival from acoustic singer-songwriter morbidity, as well as bringing a decent audience with attendant benefits in atmosphere and (equally importantly) atmospheric temperature, the local folk-pop quartet inspired a warm, fuzzy gratitude which has outlasted the cold snap.
So to the EP, which is charming, homespun, careless and not overly ambitious. The four songs revolve around John McManus’s wry Northern stoicism punctuated by Tom Hodgson’s languorous trumpet breaks, and are underpinned by a quietly authoritative rhythm section. The production is very dry, sounding as if someone’s just stuck a mike up in a living room and left the band to take its chance, but The Yarns’ studenty, semi-ironic take on English folk music seems to come out of the process pretty well.
Even his best friends would accept that McManus’s tuning is kind of approximate, but the vocals are boosted by the presence of the wonderful Roxy Brennan on opener ‘Dickhead’. You may know Roxy from The Mountain Parade, and she brings an airy amiability to this low-octane tale of a rowing couple (that’s having a fight, not sharing Stroke and Bow duties on the Isis at six in the morning). Hodgson’s brass interjections are of the comic variety, defusing what little tension there is, and the overall tone is of shamed self-deprecation, rather than erotic angst.
The band moves from the personal to the political on ‘Robert’, an overly gentle satire on Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. A couple of years ago, I heard an anguished, impassioned song on the same theme by a native of Zimbabwe, Sinini Ngwenya (reviewed here), and it’s not fair on four cheery Oxford University types to compare their efforts with that searing experience. Still, they’ve created a clever, catchy tune, name-checked Adam Smith and reminded us of the crimes and privations to be laid at the door of Zanu PF, so there’s still plenty to like.
Best of all is ‘Too Late (Gather Round)’, which is the folk musical equivalent of sitting in a cosy pub by the Cherwell with a couple of labradors warming your feet, while drinking Old Father Timer and playing Connect Four with your best mates. Hodgson’s trumpet playing has a lazy sweetness and McManus’s artless, everyman style works beautifully in context. On this song they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Stornoway, though perhaps the Stornoway of a few years ago.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that The Yarns have collaborated with members of the Parade. Both bands suffer on occasions from lapses into juvenilia- some songs can sound like they are designed for an upper-middle class crèche, but both groups are redeemed by excellent, often irresistible melodies and a winning inclusiveness on stage and on record. The Yarns seem to be popular on the local scene already, and the rise of folk as pop music is coming at a good time for them. If as unreconstructed a group as Mumford and Sons can make it onto the Radio 1 morning playlist, then songs as good as ‘Too Late’ have a decent chance of success too. And I’m not spinning you a yarn.