THE SAVING OF CADAN (Easy Action, 2018)
Of all the great triple vinyl concept albums sung partly in Cornish about a boy who tries to drown himself but is rescued by Morwenna, the Lady of the Lake, The Saving Of
Cadan is surely the only one by a band whose name is a loose translation of “Semilong”. The story goes that the Cornish band’s frontman Ben Harris used to live in Northampton. Semilong is a district there that’s particularly notorious for one of its thoroughfares, Quorn Way, which at one time attracted sex workers from throughout the Midlands. It was, apparently, extremely busy.
Semilong. Semi-long. Hanter-hir. Hanterhir. The band have been entertaining progressively minded citizens in Redruth for nigh on 15 years, and their third album The Saving Of Cadan arrived in 2018. There’s a lot to take in.
The record comprises almost one and three-quarter hours of space-rock-psych-folk adventure, with Spiritualized and My Bloody Valentine gleefully pranged into Van der Graaf Generator, Hawkwind, The Gun Club and Talking Heads. The songs are burnished with occasional bursts of excitable sax, and it all emerges from the wreckage as a swirling vortex of punk-prog pomp and majesty. Yes, really.
At first The Saving Of Cadan was envisioned as a 10-track, 10-inch EP, but as the weeks turned into months and then the months into years (the album was recorded over a four-year period, partly due to a laptop crash in which almost everything they’d already recorded was lost), it became an altogether bigger beast. Throw in some unusual recording locations – the band claim the songs were captured in “a Methodist chapel, a llama farm, a cricket club an
