Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane - The Moon Also Rises
Monday, 20 November 2023
Written by Jacob Brookman
During lockdown, Johnny Flynn teamed up with nature writer and commentator Robert Macfarlane to record an album of surprising wit, purpose and solemnity based around the Epic of Gilgamesh. Now, with the world sort-of back to normal, the two have collaborated for a second record. It’s bigger and brighter, and continues to build on Flynn’s distinctive catalogue of southern English pastoral folk.
The record deals with giant themes. Burial Blessing sounds just like that — a folksy parade through a Dorset village, past an old post office and up the hill, past cairns and sheep arriving at some kind of ancient mound. It actually touches some of the ground that Mumford and Sons once made their own, yet feels somehow more authentic. Or perhaps just less poppy.
Similarly, Uncanny Valley appears to be talking about death, only this time it’s the death of the planet. All the images are sinister yet folksy.
“Oh the sky is closing in now / The stars are on fire / The waymark is final / As funeral pyres," Flynn singce, and while the song manages to stay on the right side of out and out bleakness, it certainly leaves its mark.
Elsewhere, No Matter the Weight appears to deal in lighter subject matter. It recalls some kind of love affair remembered through the lens of river swimming. The writing is open, perhaps too open, but it does rather hammer home Macfarlane’s influence. These are songs of nature and tradition, of listening and watching.
Flynn is in the prime of his career. Like his half-brother Jerome Flynn, he is probably known primarily as an actor to the public at large and yet one can’t help but feel the beating heart of his artistry is in music. He has clearly found in Macfarlane a collaborator of great integrity and trust, and based on ‘The Moon Also Rises’, long may their relationship continue.
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