Castings

Fern Knight is ostensibly a band, but in the main, it’s the musical alias of singer/songwriter Margaret Ayre (nee Wienk: she seems to have gotten hitched to bandmate Jim Ayre since the last album). Margaret also plays cello and acoustic guitar, and is one of the brightest points of light in the Northeastern neo-psych-folk constellation that includes the Espers crew, Marissa Nadler, and Orion Rigel Dommisse. Fern Knight doesn’t have any truck with the kind of lo-fi, lazy-hippie sounds that tend to fall under the too-ubiquitous “freak folk” umbrella, mind you: the musicians gathered here are too skilled for that, and there’s a pronounced prog influence to the proceedings. Hell, the penultimate track here is a lovingly arranged, finely wrought cover of King Crimson’s apocalyptic ballad “Epitaph"! On Castings, the fourth Fern Knight outing, frontwoman Ayre and her band of merry men work up a fresh round of dark, spooky tunes heavily influenced by the early-‘70s sounds of U.K. art-folk fringe-dwellers like Comus and Midwinter, and the folkie end of the Krautrock spectrum (Broselmaschine, Witthüser & Westrupp). The melancholy melodies unfold over stately rhythms for an agreeably sepulchral mood that makes you want to commission a remake of the cult-classic documentary Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, just so Ayre and company could score it.