It opens with a haunting howl, somewhere between ghost and distant factory or perhaps ship’s siren; it closes with a looped, metallic sounding riff. And in between it is all post-jazz driven by a proper bit of rock drumming. Like Sun Ra jamming with the Who. In Belfast.
‘The Shankill Graveyard’, the outstanding title track to Scream Blue Murmer’s latest album, is the first in a series of portraits of neighbourhoods stretching across the north of their home city.
The journey – for once this tired word is perfectly appropriate – takes you from the eponymous graveyard to the Mallusk Cemetery just a few miles away.
If the opening track brought out the post-industrial ghosts of Belfast, the second track, ‘Ballysillan’, immediately brings out the city’s resilience. The loops are funkier, the bass lays down a deeper groove – and there’s a hint of an Afro-beat flavour. I half expected Fela Kuti’s voice to cut in with some incisive commentary on the Twaddell stand-off. Yet the track is, ultimately, upbeat, positive. Yes, it seems to say, this is a troubled city; but it is also a city of resilience, of character, of a cheeky-chappie humour that you just can’t put down.
Africana turns to spooky reggae for ‘McArts Fort in the morning’, a track that includes the album’s first hint of vocals in the shape of disembodied soprano and bass voices drifting in and out of focus. The only other vocals here, incidentally, come in the form of Muhammed Ali’s speech to students, explaining why he did not fight in Vietnam – a significant sample, not least in the context of the band’s back catalogue. The turn to instrumental music for a band that started off as a performance poetry group may be surprising, but on this evidence it pays ample dividends. The musicians are really playing as a band now – tight as such a big ensemble has to be, but clearly listening to, and comfortable with each other.
The African influence returns in full force for ‘Serpentine’ opening as it does with a guest djembe solo from the brilliant Ghanaian drummer (and now Belfast resident) Thomas Annang, and the album reaches its destination – its final resting place – with a brief, soulful, musical conversation between trombone and flute at Mallusk Cemetery.
These eight tracks – collectively lasting 23 minutes, the time it took the band to drive between the start and end of their chosen territory – constitute a unique musical reflection on north Belfast.
It is a part of the city, as we all know, with a troubled past, but one not exhausted by the conflict, nor by the insistently repeated trope of the ‘two communities’. Scream’s response to the areas they have travelled through brings out both the differences and the interconnections between them.
It is tempting to hear the brassy chords, the funk and groove of the bass, the reggae and hip-hop influences as hints that our new neighbours who have joined us from overseas in recent years are bringing new colours to the city. That’s certainly the case; but there’s more to it than that, I think.
Arguably, in this blend of the post-industrial and the post-colonial, it is possible to hear a hint that we were all neighbours all along: we did not have to wait for people from Africa and the Caribbean to move here for that. In other words, the history of Belfast is inseparable from the broader history of the era of European Empires and its long aftermath.
If there are more than two communities in Belfast now, there always were – lots of communities, always changing, always in a sense interdependent. Scream Blue Murmer have, in their short journey across these varied neighbourhoods, woven a single musical fabric that brings out the material connections between us, all of us, as neighbours.
The full band line up:
Drums – Matt Hewer
Djembe – Lindsay Crothers (Djembe on Serpentine: Thomas Annang)
Bass/Cornet/Keyboards – Keith Watterson
Tenor Saxophone/Mouth Harp – Wallace Gibson
Alto Saxophone – Peter Cullen
Trombone – Nathan Moore
Flute – Julia Cross
Guitar – Lorcan Falls
Guitar – Gordon Hewitt
11 July 2015
Community of Others 