#transgressive

The New Eves use folk imagery and modal chords in their songs, but punch things up with pounding rhythms and an irrepressible spirit of DIY.  None of the women—Violet Farrer (guitar, violin, vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar, vocals), Kate Mager (bass, vocals) and Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals)—had ever been in a band before.  Farrar learned violin specifically so that she could play it in The New Eves.  So, while opener “Astrolabe” drones and haunts and harmonizes like a pre-industrial dirge, it also pummels.  Throbs of cello and fiddle, thwacks of drum land like battering fists, as the vocals keen and swirl. 

What’s interesting about The New Eves is the way they recontextualize pastoral folk to make it more accepting of women.  For instance, in “The New Eve,” cellist Nina Winder-Lind chants a stirring re-imagination of the Eden myth, a sensual, self-determinative version in which Eve ends up not banished from the garden, but the instrument of its propagation. 

Consider how visceral these images are, and how far from the church’s cowering, self-loathing version of Eve.  “The new Eve is curious and free/ she eats what she wants to eat/ every fruit from every tree/ she devours guiltlessly and thick red fruit blood run down her hungry mouth/and thick red fruit blood run down her naked thighs/ the new Eve is not ashamed when she bleeds/ the new eve spits out the seeds from the fruit of the forbidden tree and then she plants them carefully, nurturing an orchard of apple trees.”    

Likewise taut, propulsive “Highway Man,” shifts the perspective of an old poem, giving the woman loved by the highway man her own agency, her own lust, her own violence.  The song is fantastically engrossing, hitched onto a galloping, headlong beat, wreathed in tone-morphing vocal harmonies and scrawled at the margins with wild permutations of violin.  Even harmonica-drenched “Mary” reconfigures the Madonna myth to make its central figure—even embodied, as here, in a wooden icon—into an architect of her own story. 

The world has been getting darker for women lately, as religious zealots of every stripe conspire to lock them back into the old cells: continual childbirth, servitude, ignorance.  The New Eves aren’t going down easy, though, and we shouldn’t either.  Here’s an album to keep you strong as the lights go out everywhere.