People who make new year's resolutions are just boring, aren't they? What's wrong with being happy with who you are, with what you are, right now? What's wrong with embracing your favourite thing, not searching for something new? What's wrong with looking back, not forward?

 

At Downend Folk & Roots this month it's, very much, a case of New Year, Old Favourites.

 

UK Americana superheroes THE BLACK FEATHERS have played here three times in the last ten, or so, years and a packed room is delighted to welcome them back again.

 

 

Sian Chandler and Ray Hughes have, clearly, decided that there's no need for resolutions either. This might be the first show that they've played in three months but they are just as glorious, just as heart-wrenching, just as perfectly imperfect as ever.

 

Down by the River is taken from their 2016 debut, Soaked to the Bone, and has lost none of its ability to wrap you up in the Black Feathers world. There are wonderful harmonies, the lazy strum of an acoustic guitar, the shadow of melancholy cast by the Country sun and a tune that gently lodges itself into your psyche. It might be ten years old but, when things are this good, why bother with anything else?

 

The same goes for Hurricane (from 2022's Angel Dust & Cyanide) and Strangers We Meet (from their very first EP); they are old friends that you simply wouldn't want to do without. These are songs where the emotions are right on the surface, barely kept in check by two voices working together beautifully.

 

Don't go thinking, though, that there's nothing new here. Tonight marks the first time that they have played a cover of Adele's When We Were Young. Hughes reckons he's “terrified” but it doesn't show, instead it becomes the sort of thing you could find on the soundtrack from one of those John Hughes movies from the '80s. Chandler's voice is gravel-dipped-in-honey while Hughes replaces Adele's lachrymose piano with delicate, sensitive acoustic guitar and an effortless foundation.

 

 

It is this symbiosis that makes The Black Feathers so remarkable. There is no doubt that Chandler's voice is an astonishing thing - part heart-broken Country, part Soul stirring sister, part evangelist abandonment - but when she sings on her own she turns the dial down. Sometimes it sounds as though she's singing in another room, she's vulnerable, hesitant. It is when Hughes joins her that you catch your breath. It's as though she just needs a hand to hold, a ledge to lean on. Then, she blazes. 

 

On Goodbye Tomorrow she adds steely strength to a classic chorus, on Perfect Storm she plumbs the depths of misery while Hughes shimmers and twinkles. The two make a perfect whole, you need them both.

 

A new song, probably called Return to my Trees, encapsulates all of this. Chandler is exposed, halting, struggling with the weight of melancholy as the song begins. Perhaps it is because it's new, perhaps because they've barely ever played it live but her voice catches, is uncertain... until Hughes joins her. Then there is power and colour and an incredible sense of balance. If this is where the new album is going to take us, it's going to be so good.

 

There are, of course, a couple of brilliant cover versions in amongst all of the Country-got-Soul beauty. Portishead's Glory Box continues to be a sassy stomper in the hands of Chandler and Hughes. Less a smoky noir-ish femme fatal, more a technicolour Hollywood tempt-er-ess. Spirit in the Sky is performed off mic for the well-deserved encore, and has the fervour of a Pentecostal revivalist meeting, Chandler testifying with the best of them. With a couple of Munsters’ finger clicks they are gone and, inevitably, you can't wait to see them again.

 

 

If The Black Feathers show us the value in remembering old friends, then HANNAH WOOD represents an exciting new year's resolution for most. A Bristol-based singer-songwriter, she is a seriously good teller of tales. There's a delicious spookiness to The Ash Tree, all Victorian lace and flitting shadows, while Sweet Reprieve has a chorus that is almost hymn-like and a tune that relishes its Old Grey Whistle Test folkie vibe. Fundevogel is inspired by one of Grimm's Fairy Tales and has echoes of Suzanne Vega in its word-y swoops; it is delightfully complex and wonderfully clever. The title track of Wood's latest EP, Rabbits, sways gently, her voice as clear and pure as a crisp January day. It casts a shaft of sunlight across the melancholy. 

 

In 2026, if you must make a resolution, make it this - remember your old friends but make new ones too. Downend Folk & Roots will help you.