Alexander Tucker: Furrowed Brow

Furrowed Brow is as English — and as unsettling — as the ghost stories of M. R. James or the original Wicker Man movie. Coming from the same misty, pagan hollows of Albion that spawned the mystical acid-folk outpourings of the early 1970s, Tucker’s second album combines bucolic, acoustic finger picking; multi-layered, ethereal vocal harmonies; stridulating violin; over-driven psych-out guitar lines; and deep, deep doom drones. The result is a deliciously tense and chilling experience conjuring foul deeds in the woods, nameless rituals and dark, wordless secrets — an eldritch and oddly seductive compendium of the uncanny. When, on “Rotten Shade”, Tucker’s multi-tracked, many-pitched vocals intone “I woke up surrounded, able to look up / Some shape ripe and rotting had turned away”, we’re suddenly surrounded by a coven of hooded figures, looming in the cold night fog, slowly pulling back their cowls to reveal the same identical, bearded face. Now put another log on the fire and gather round for one more tale my pretties…