Native Spirit Records Press Release - December 2007
The New Bluehorses Album - Thirteen Fires - Native Spirit NSBH CD007
They’re back with their first album in 7 years and they ain’t taking no prisoners! Welsh Celtic Rockers, Bluehorses, have gone back to their roots and come up with a new album ‘Thirteen Fires’ that’s dripping with metallic riffs, double kick-drums and soaring violin.
Fronted by Irish/Welsh Gothess, Lizzie Prendergast, whose storming electric-violin, electric-Celtic-harp and vocals provide the Celtic flavour, the band have come out of the closet - and brought some skeletons with them!
Founder member, drummer and arranger Nic Waulker says “Over the last 15 years we’ve played numerous festivals in every country in the UK, Europe and Scandinavia, but compared to the stuff we’ve jammed in the privacy of Bluehorse Towers, we’ve always toned things down quite a bit. Thanks to the delights of YouTube, we’ve discovered there’s a massive Folk Metal scene going on in Europe and Scandinavia headed up by bands like Korpiklaani and In Extremo and it’s made us realise there’s now an awful lot of people around who want to hear the kind of music we’ve always really enjoyed playing.
With Thirteen Fires we’ve let our hair down and are just being ourselves. I think this new stuff actually sounds more like us than anything we’ve recorded in the past, because with the dearth of out and out rock festivals through the 90’s, we managed to keep playing a lot of festivals by working within the folky infrastructure By following that route we’ve been doing as many as 20 festivals across the UK and Europe in some years, but the downside was we couldn’t put out anything too heavy or we’d have cut down the number of them who’d entertain us.
Even then, once we did the live shows, we still caused plenty of protest from the Folk-Police… “ ‘eavy Metal at Trowbridge Festival???! I never heard nothin like it...” and (shrilly) “I had to run out of the marquee to protect my hearing...” blah blah.
But no more will we be restrained from producing the most storming Celtic-flavoured rock and roll music possible by old reactionaries and Luddites!
Jay made a huge contribution to creating the sound of the album, far more than any other band member in the past. With previous work it’s always tended to be me driving the process along with Lizzie. This time I mainly worked with Jay on the basic ideas and Lizzie came in after to add violin parts and together we put together the vocal melodies and choruses. That way we ended up with a collection of tracks with a far more out and out rock sound which I think will appeal to a much wider audience.
The guitars are a lot more prominent than on anything we’ve done before and it’s a pretty wild and heavy beast, while still keeping all the familiar elements that make Bluehorses music unique.
Here’s the tracklist:
1. Dance With Me
2. Ray of Light
3. Calling My Loves
4. The Ride
5. Chant
6. Raggle Taggle Gypsio
7. The Unknown
8. The Fool
9. Aberdulais
10. Waes Hael
