The Goblin Market is the duo of Jeff Kelly and Laura Weller. They’ve been around on and off for more than a decade, releasing just a handful of albums in between work with their main band, the Green Pajamas. Beneath Far Gondal’s Foreign Sky is a collection of songs inspired by the works of the Bronte sisters. Some of these songs actually set Bronte poems to music, while others take a more general inspiration.
This is a concept with great potential to come across as incredibly nerdy, terribly twee, or some horrific combination of both, so it’s to Kelly and Weller’s great credit that the album is a highly listenable piece of folk-rock. Yes, it’s still nerdy and twee, but it could have been so much worse. There are a lot of gently strummed acoustic guitars and twinkly pianos here — and even the occasional synth woodwinds and brass — but the Goblin Market aren’t afraid to turn up the distortion and rock out every now and then. A quiet, affecting ballad like “The Lock” is the standard folk interpretation for this kind of material, but the setting of the poem “The Night Wind” is driven by a pair of strong electric guitar riffs and some ace bass playing. The band always sounds folky, even when they turn up the guitars and employ a real drummer, and that’s probably a consequence of their poetic and old-fashioned flow of the lyrics. But Beneath Far Gondal’s Foreign Sky is a surprisingly accessible and entertaining album.