The Fallen By Watch Bird

In 2010, English songwriter Jane Weaver released her fourth solo album, The Fallen by Watch Bird. At this point in Weaver’s artistic path, she was moving from an indie sound with Americana underpinnings toward increasingly psychedelic folk. The Fallen by Watch Bird cemented this shift to trippy, experimental folk, offering a loosely conceptual suite of songs with contributions from earlier generations of acid rock-adjacent folk artists. A drone of harmonium and free-floating acoustic instruments serves as a witchy invocation of the album’s strange magic, with synthesizer tones bubbling below the surface of “Europium Alluminate,” and a fluttering harp leading into a spoken word cameo from ‘60s psych songwriter Susan Christie on “A Circle and a Star.” Weaver brings in Krautrock-inspired repetition and drive on the title track, but the majority of the album is moody and mysterious in the same vein as the heaviest tracks on ‘60s and ‘70s acid folk masterworks from artists like Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs. She tempers straightforward acoustic tunes like “Whispers of Winter” with experimental interludes inspired by the playful side of library music and the more cosmic reaches of the Berlin School of synthesizer exploration. The album draws to a close beautifully on final tune “Silver Chord,” a song made up of gorgeous strings, harp plucks, and fragile, reverb-shrouded vocal interplay from Weaver and Wendy Flower of the obscure late-‘60s psychedelic group Wendy & Bonnie. The Fallen by Watch Bird is both delicate and ominous throughout, marking a turning point in Weaver’s career that would lead to more cosmic and combustible sounds. It’s a quietly staggering album, one that takes hold slowly but hits with more weight than its sometimes wispy auspices would suggest. ~ Fred Thomas