TWELVE THOUSAND DAYS - The Boatman on the Downs

label: FinalMuzik, 2025 , limited edition CD Digipak, 500 copies,  file : Neofolk, Wyrd Folk, Eyeless In Gaza, Orchis, World Serpent

 label-info:

Martyn Bates & Alan Trench return to the ghost-haunted Downs of Southern England for their new album, their fourth in five years to be released by Italy’s Final Muzik label.

Twelve Thousand Days are without a doubt producing some of the finest music in their twenty-five years of existence, abstract and evocative songs that seem to be from the folk canon, so rooted in tradition are they – and the band always give more than a nod to past glories with arrangements of “Arthur McBride” and a song which all children in England once learnt in primary school, “Early One Morning”, which is found here dis-assembled and fed through the haze of more than half a century of lives lived.

The two traditional songs sit comfortably alongside eight new compositions; “Comely” sets the tone, full of yearning and loss, and yet basking in hope, full of haunted voices and distant bells; the journey continues through tales of Wayland the Smith and the Silver City inspired by the verse of John Masefield, magickal tales of djinns and other spirits, an elegy to a departed friend, and more.

The soaring voice of Martyn Bates is underpinned by exquisite instrumentation – acoustic guitars, flute organs, bodhrans and bells, mellotrons and analogue synthesisers, taking the

listener on a trip through the forgotten highways and byways of a drowned land.