Netherworld by Louise Patricia Crane

“Our world is a magical smoke screen”—so reckons Margaret Lanterman AKA the Log Lady in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, remarking on her navigation through the wonders and tribulations of daily life. Indeed, understanding where any of us are heading frequently involves the challenge of decoding everyday signs and signals, and sometimes venturing into the mystic, the better to confront reality.

Deep Blue, Louise Patricia Crane’s stunning debut of 2020, arrived steeped in just this kind of intrigue—offering fortitude through communion with the ethereal and the preternatural. What’s become clear, however, is that here Louise was really barely getting started. Her second album Netherworld goes deeper and more intrepidly down this path, exploring her musical roots as adeptly as it does the darker and more hidden corners of her psyche. Possessed of a steadfast intent and rich in emotion—it uses the trajectory from the forest to the firmament as the backdrop for a powerful journey of storytelling and individual revelation.

Even amidst a supernatural dreamscape, Netherworld possesses a scope that extends from the personal to the political, from the whimsical and esoteric all the way to matters of life and death. Therefore, whilst the joyful ‘Tiny Bard’ is an affectionate fairytale ode to Louise’s cat, ‘Toil And Trouble’—a disarmingly beautiful moment of sobriety on the album—takes its cues from Shakespeare in depicting the turbulent and often terrifying political landscape that Louise grew up surrounded by, in Northern Ireland.

Musically, the widescreen sweep of these songs and their range of influences knows no bounds. Right from the outset, the opener ‘Dance With The Devil' takes inspiration from Irish folk and mythology of her heritage to tackle her own self-destructive past head-on, amidst a fantastical panorama which can’t help but evoke the transporting realm of Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love and The Sensual World. ‘Celestial Dust’ meanwhile sees her turning her gaze to the cosmos, the better to understand her own place on Earth, with the epic scale of the track bearing witness to the attendant sense of wonder. ‘Spirit Of The Forest’ conversely takes a glorious, cinematic journey into the natural world, channeling all its beauty, melancholy and majesty whilst paying homage with love to the falconry of her youth, and her explorations of secrets within Mount Stewart forest.

Netherworld marks a considerable step onwards from the territory that Louise explored on Deep Blue, crafting audial landscapes that go further into both inner and outer space; hallucinatory and surrealistic yet also grittier and more direct. For all that this stemmed in part from early Genesis and The Beatles, Netherworld also sits in alignment with the luxurious but oddly intimate realm of modern classics, by the likes of Tears For Fears, Tori Amos and Joni Mitchell, with passionate intensity set in a bold, cinematic vista.

Testimony to the stylistic diversity of this record, 'The Red Room'—one of the most intimate songs on the album—summons '60s psychedelia and dreampop radiance in search of a portrayal of bliss and intoxication, whilst nocturnal Jeff Buckley-esque shapes haunt 'Long Kiss Goodnight', and 'Bête Noire’—a vast shapeshifting dreamscape which sees progressive jazz inflections and vocal hallucinations in search of communion with her darker consciousness—is by far the most abstract and experimental song she's thus far committed to posterity. Yet this last, like much of this record, is an endeavor to venture deep within her own past, passions and foibles; venturing a charged autobiographical travelogue from childhood memories to the present—an album that exists simultaneously in a fantastical landscape and in the Belfast where she grew up.

In realising these romantic and expansive visions, Louise not only wrote or co-wrote the entire album, but arranged, co-produced it and played a wide variety of instruments, including guitars, keyboard and piano, from harpsichord to mellotron, from bass guitar to EBow, along with collating found sounds and adding percussion along the way. Yet as a supporting cast, she has surrounded herself with a formidable selection of mercurial contributors. Once again, Jakko M. Jakszyk (King Crimson) brings his fiery and mellifluous solo guitar work, as well as contributing backing vocals, keyboards and co-production. Elsewhere, the flute soliloquies of Tiny Bard are the work of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. What’s more, the saxophone work on Netherworld comes courtesy of Mel Collins, whose work with King Crimson marks only one chapter in an incredibly storied life in music. Providing violin and viola across the stylistic expanse of the album, Shir-Ran Yinon (New Model Army/Eluveitie) returns as a collaborator.

The rhythm section for the lion's share of the record consists of the dream team of Tony Levin (King Crimson/Peter Gabriel) and Gary Husband (John McLaughlin/Billy Cobham/Alan Holdsworth amongst many others) with Nick Beggs stepping in on bass for 'Dance With The Devil' and upright bass on 'Long Kiss Goodnight'. Crucially however, even amidst this kind of company, Louise’s voice and vision is never remotely overshadowed—with the talents on offer only serving to make the backdrop to her songs still more vivid, sharp and intense.

Nonetheless, above and beyond the notes in the ether and the air moving from the amps, Netherworld forms a journey into the land of spirits, partly spurred on by a combination of the magical and the macabre of the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm. Using these as a framework for these introspective journeys, they’ve helped form a narrative backdrop for Netherworld, not only in providing metaphorical currents on which to explore her inner life but in offering the symbolism of the animal kingdom which runs throughout the album’s songs.

In as much as Netherworld is a work that exists on a lineage of progressive music and the visionary artists who’ve expanded their boundaries of exploration to form sound-worlds as big as their imagination, it’s also a work of magical realism in the tradition of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Company Of Wolves or the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Haruki Murakami—in which the supernatural and otherworldly, lead to a shortcut to the essence of being human. In this World, Louise is our Storyteller.

Angela Carter once talked of “a series of marvellous shapes formed in the kaleidoscope of desire”. Netherworld, in all its majestic scope and phantasmagoric glory, summons up all of this and much more.

Louise Patricia Crane is a singer-songwriter whose work draws on a wide range of musical and artistic influences, to produce a sound that is undeniably her own. From guitar-driven '70s progressive rock & blues, through to '80s avant-garde dream pop, Louise's work blends all of her influences to weave her own unique magic spell.