Jennifer Castle – Camelot

Historically, pop music has often reached into Arthurian legend for a handy metaphor. It is, after all, a symbolist’s paradise – the enchanted vale of Van Morrison’s “Avalon Of The Heart”, for instance, or David Crosby’s Californian hippie dream reflected back as “Guinnevere”. The Moody Blues’ spellbound evocation of Camelot on “Are You Sitting Comfortably?”, perhaps. Or, more literally, Rick Wakeman’s preposterous chainmail folly on ice.

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This ongoing thread of references in song – from Nat King Cole to Nas, Stevie Nicks to The Streets – tends to follow a pattern. Much like its depictions in literature, TV and film, Camelot is invariably viewed as shorthand for a certain kind of glorious perfection, a mythic crucible of courage and nobility, the embodiment of utopia. Monty Python notwithstanding, of course.

By contrast, Jennifer Castle’s Camelot, as mapped on her seventh album, is something altogether more nuanced. Hers is a battleground of opposing tensions, set against the divisive times of the present. There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of faith. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, but for earthly and private resolutions. All fixed to music of the exquisite variety, from radiant acoustic studies to billowing symphonic pop.

Camelot feels like a landmark in Castle’s career. It’s certainly her most all-embracing record to date, the full fruition of an approach that began, tentatively, with a pair of mostly spare folk-countryish albums under her Castlemusic alias. The first of those was released some 18 years ago, since when she’s quietly emerged as a talent to rival contemporaries like Joan Shelley, Brigid Mae Power or fellow Canadian Tamara Lindeman in her guise as The Weather Station.

Much of Castle’s previous work has leaned towards the minimal, paring songs down to their bones and investing them with subtle and spacious atmospherics, guided by an effortlessly agile voice capable of conveying both the everyday and the existential. She isn’t averse to taking the expansive route either – consider the lush strings that cushion elements of 2014’s Pink City; the full-band arrangements of 2018’s Angels Of Death – but Camelot combines the best of these impulses in newly adventurous ways.

The first inkling arrived early this summer, when “Blowing Kisses” broke nearly four years of studio silence. Released to soundtrack an episode of hit TV comedy-drama The Bear (Castle used to work in a Toronto restaurant with the show’s co-producer and cast member Matty Matheson), it’s an eloquent tune that pushes the value of basking in the moment, driven by jazz-ballad piano and a sumptuous string arrangement from Owen Pallett for Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra. There’s all the grace of a spiritual hymn, but it sounds like a fresh vow. “Don’t get it twisted,” sings Castle, gliding around the melody and rising into a soft rapture, “My heart’s still in it/My dedication’s a star.”

“Blowing Kisses” was the first song tracked for Camelot. It’s a worthy showcase for her and the assembled band, some of whose members go way back with Castle, while others are relatively new. Listen closely and you can almost hear them – Carl Didur on piano, bassist Mike Smith, Evan Cartwright on drums, Castle’s acoustic guitar – probing for the right spaces to fall in together. This approach often lends the album a charged, extemporised feel.

Nothing captures this better than the magnificent “Full Moon In Leo”. Here, Castle stays true to the lunar definition of the title – an optimum moment to reveal the true inner self, an outpouring of passion and creativity – by leading a tune bouncing with vitality. Its gospel-funk heart is pumped by fat guitar distortion, sax, whirling electric piano and Castle’s swooping voice. There’s a timeless quality at work here too, reminiscent of, say, early ’70s Carole King or Laura Nyro at her most rhapsodic.

Lyrically, “Full Moon In Leo” is playful. “I push my broom/In my underwear and my attitude/And nothing more,” enthuses Castle two verses deep. But the song also embodies the ambiguity of Camelot as a whole. She’s tired of the capricious nature of the music industry, and also weary of waiting to be noticed on a broader scale: “I’ve got friends going grey/Just awaiting my face/To arrive on a billboard/On Fairfax Avenue/In sunny LA.” By the end of the song though, Castle is committed to the moment once again, pledging allegiance to the creative forces that shape her. This, she decides, is the way it should be. She even carves her own one-line epitaph on metaphorical stone: “The dream is alive and well.”

“Lucky #8” is built of similarly resistant stuff. Castle invokes angels and archangels, cosmic law and experiential notions of being (“What percentage am I spirit?/What percentage is machine?”) in order to make sense of everything around us, but ultimately finds herself transported by the physical rhythms of dance. The song moves at a decent lick too, all ringing guitars, psychedelic overtones and gorgeous harmonies. Longtime co-producer Jeff McMurrich steps up on lead guitar, while guest Cass McCombs – whose own music feels like an analogue to that of Castle, with their friendship stretching back over a decade – makes a telling contribution on slide.

This idea of navigating a way through uncertainty is a central feature of Camelot. Sited around one of Castle’s favourite local hiking spots in Ontario, “Fractal Canyon” takes nourishment from the things she holds dear – friends, loved ones, the great outdoors, the warmth of a random memory – while her unanswered questions eventually give way to a simple affirmation: “And I’m not alone here.” “Earthsong” carries much the same sentiment. A delicate acoustic piece that highlights both Castle’s silvery guitar-playing and beautifully supple voice, it was inspired by Indian anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva. The idea of seeds as symbols of nurture and growth also ties into Castle’s experience as a farm labourer during the pandemic: “Mary, I know it’s thee/Folk mother pouring tea/Safe and sitting on the seed.”

These sure-footed earthly connections serve as Castle’s protection against the things that trouble her, whether it’s the two-faced cronies of “Some Friends” or the hypocrites and cynics that populate “Trust”, an emotional tug-of-war that ends with an ominously clanging piano chord. Or indeed the gory stigmata of “Mary Miracle”, informed by watching a TV news story on weeping religious statues as a kid, imagining the blood coursing “down the thighs of the porcelain angels/There by the riverbed thrashing in the mud.” The nightmarish intensity of Castle’s child vision is mirrored in the song’s relentless churn, styled like an ’80s arcade keyboard run that refuses to pipe down.

Whether or not she ends up plastered on an LA billboard is anyone’s guess. But that’s surely not the point. Much less the goal. Of greater import is the fact that, nearly two decades into her artistic life, Castle has moved into her imperial phase. The journey may not always be smooth, but Camelot is the outward manifestation of that surer focus and clarity of purpose. And, it appears, the kind of self-acceptance that only comes with experience. As she points out here: “I belong to the world.”

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