It’s been four years since Anna and Rowan Rheingans last released an album, 2020’s brilliant Receiver, and in that time they’ve both been mighty busy. Rowan with Lady Maisery and her debut theatre show Dispatches on the Red Dress, Anna with teaching and studying Occitan music, making documentaries, and the Town is by the Sea podcast.
It is, therefore, with a tremendous sense of anticipation that Start Close In is welcomed.
It’s hard to escape the idea that folk music is undergoing something of a revival at the moment. The sonic adventurousness of Lankum, of Broadside Hacks, of Stick in the Wheel are all pushing the traditional to embrace, once again, the experimental. Start Close In can take its place next to all of these.
Starting with Devils, a feminist re-telling of the deeply misogynist The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife or The Farmer’s Cursed Wife [Roud 160], the Rheingans seem determined to put teeth on edge, to unsettle and wrongfoot. A tortured tambourin à cordes and distorted viola screeches and howls, dragging a pain from the darkest depths until Rowan’s voice seeks to apply some sort of balm. The sisters harmonise yet, far from making everything better, the contrast just makes things more uncomfortable. The drone of a fiddle falls in step with Rowan’s voice as the gates of Hell squeal open around her. The sheer power, the savage defiance, neatly echoes the themes of the song – if proof were needed that “women are much better than men”, then this is proof positive.
If folk music is to make it in our Spotify age, we can’t just rely on pretty versions of familiar ballads. We’re going to need the fearless attitude of people like Rowan and Anna too.
If Devils forms part of a furious reckoning, and it is far from the only song on the album with this level of intensity, then Brädmarsch is chilly and spacious. A fiddle tune that comes in at less than two minutes, it is a Northern European dance tune that Anna learnt from Olof Misgeld while studying at Bollnäs Folkhögskola back in 2008. The fiddle playing is gorgeous, of course, but there’s a sense of springy-ness given by a Jaw Harp. It almost seems as though the Rheingans Sisters are determined to undercut the beauty yet again.
There’s a restlessness to Start Close In. Not only in the boundary pushing, the experimentation, but also in the desire to traverse the European traditions. The Rheingans have never been satisfied with England’s green and pleasant lands and so it is here too. Un Voltigeur is sung in the polyphonic singing communities of the Pyrenees and Anna has re-fashioned it into something part spoken, part sung. An insistent two-note banjo motif, the shimmer of Rowan’s electric guitar and Anna’s impeccable French makes it entirely otherworldly. Daniel Thorne’s late-night, rain-slashed saxophone and the sister’s harmonies help convey the unconditional love that blooms in the gardening metaphors.
Livet Behöver Inga Droger (Life needs no drugs) is another fiddle tune from Europe but this time the two fiddles circle one another, trying to figure whether they can be friends. One is high and lonely, the other attempts to harmonise but seems to retreat. It’s a difficult, disjointed dance, two sisters reuniting after a time apart.
That feeling of the fiddles communicating a sense of the uncomfortable is further explored on The Great Devil / Mr. Turner’s Hornpipe. It starts, slowly, with a violin playing a jig while another drones, tracing gentle circles like a solitary person slowly turning in a darkened room, watched over by secret eyes. After a while Steve Turner’s hornpipe starts to emerge, the solo fiddle begins but a tiny bit unhinged until it joins the dance, joins the accordion, and seems to feel good. Everything joins together, fleetingly, but it soon returns to sitting in its corner, rocking slowly back and forth.

With all of this loneliness and pain it is, therefore, something of a surprise that Rowan says of Drink Up, that you “have to find the joy where you can”. It is, however, her swingeing attack on late-stage capitalism so, maybe, her ideas of finding joy are not exactly the same as yours. With a fiddle and some thumped, sprung percussion Rowan sounds incredibly modern and very annoyed. This is a very contemporary, slightly noisy, folk song, one that stands on the right side of history and views the world with weary, and frustrated, eyes. There’s wit in the lyrics – “everyone’s tumbling in from the rain/everyone’s going see Dylan again” – and beauty in the whistles and sisterly harmony. The fiddle see-sawing away in the background can’t hide its annoyance though.
The other of Rowan’s songs on Start Close In that bristles with modernity and barely repressed desperation is Over and Over. Written in response to, helplessly, watching war unfold across social media, it starts with ghostly strings, a harsh push and pull and a guitar flicker. It is desperately sad. As Rowan’s improvised guitar takes charge there is less harshness, a greater sense of contemplation. Her voice gentle, soothing as she simply repeats the title again and again. It’s simple but the resonance is impossibly deep, almost as though she is locked into a helpless spiral of repetition. As the fiddle joins, the sense of helplessness is not lifted. It might be more gentle but it is no less anguished.
If Rowan is looking at the world and finding reasons to be angry, Anna seems to delight in friends, in late-night dancing and in wry wisdoms. Shade Chaser is a glorious, Quebecois-influenced, instrumental fiddle tune that twists and turns, shaking loose from a tenacious drone. Marche à la Cabrette is slow and deliberate, tinged with the wood smoke of bonfires and midnight dances. Old Neptune starts with a gourd banjo and summons the sea god onto an empty beach, as it lies back to watch the clouds and the vapour trails scud above it. It’s fragile, gentle, old-timey.
There’s a hypnotic stickiness, like the Turkish Delight on the other side of the wardrobe, something profoundly uncomfortable yet impossible to leave alone.
The message of the bourrée chantée, Marche à la Cabrette, is a simple one – do not get married, you will regret it. Anna, again, sings in French and, perhaps, helps to imbue the song with a shoulder-shrugging insouciance. She sounds resigned as the fiddles dart around, picking up a tune and letting it drop, submerging it under drones and then picking it up again. There’s a hypnotic stickiness, like the Turkish Delight on the other side of the wardrobe, something profoundly uncomfortable yet impossible to leave alone. The chopped and re-arranged wedding bells at the end only add to the queasy sense of discomfort.
Start Close In is as impressive, as important as anything that the Rheingans Sisters have ever been involved in. It’s uncomfortable and harsh, experimental and brave, there are difficult themes and a profound sense of loneliness throughout. It is also utterly transporting, incredibly beautiful and genuinely magical. If folk music is to make it in our Spotify age, we can’t just rely on pretty versions of familiar ballads. We’re going to need the fearless attitude of people like Rowan and Anna too.
Start Close In is available now from The Rheingans Sisters’ Bandcamp page on digital, CD and vinyl. They will also be out on tour throughout November; dates and tickets on their website.