Woodcut is an immense, nearly seventy-minute concept album, Big Big Train’s (BBT) first such attempt. Simply put, it’s the story of an artist struggling on the creative front who decides to make a woodcut and, suddenly, this piece of art comes to life… or does it? It’s a continuous narrative exploring creativity, sacrifice and the thin line between creativity and madness (who’d have thought creating would take so much away? The Artist). Thus, it’s a very involved storyline and there’s plenty to read about it in the CD liner notes, plus there’s also much more in the book of the same name, being published on the same day as the album’s release.
The idea for Woodcut came out of a visit to Oslo’s Munchmuseet, which led to Greg Spawton (bass) and Alberto Bravin (vocals) evolving the initial ideas, which other band members also contributed to. Even though BBT is a band comprising seven members who live in six different countries, they’ve found a way to make this work and have come up with possibly one of their finest albums.
Woodcut has everything you’d associate with a BBT album. The level of musicianship continues to amaze. Only Gentle Giant are BBT’s equal when it comes to the range of instruments each band member can play, alongside how well they can play them. Very few prog bands could carry off an instrumental track like ‘Cut And Run’. There’re elements of the pastoral whimsiness of their earlier releases, it’s quietly symphonic and bombastic in places, there’re short instrumental passages as bridges to slightly longer tracks, the usage of a wide range of musical instruments and some heavier moments. On rockier tracks like ‘Albion Press’ and Warp And Weft, guitar man Rikard Sjöblom lets rip, with ‘Warp And Weft’ also featuring great drumming from Nick D’Virgilio alongside the band engaging in contrapuntal harmonies, which are also employed on the gorgeous ‘Dreams In Black And White’, which sees violinist Clare Lindley sharing vocals with Alberto.
The musical subtleties BBT are renowned for are also present on shorter instrumental pieces like ‘Second Press’ and ‘Hawthorne White’. The images BBT can bring to mind when they perform such tracks is one of the things which separates them from other bands. After the short melancholic sounding intro of ‘Inkwell Black’, it’s ‘The Artist’ which shows us the initial issue in creating art: half a lifetime’s work and not much to show. It’s a powerful track with stunning musicianship but performed in an accessible manner, similarly with ‘The Sharpest Blade’, which has a delightful flow and fine violin playing from Clare Lindley.
On this album, great credit has to go to vocalist Alberto Bravin, who replaced the tragically taken far too soon David Longdon and who’s more than risen to the occasion. His painstaking work in sifting through “literally hundreds of individual pieces of music” created the framework which the band completed in the studio.
Woodcut is a truly ambitious release, lots of different ideas put together and made into a collective whole, suggesting BBT is moving confidently forward and embracing the challenge of proving they’re not just all about sounding quintessentially English and writing songs about hedgerows. BBT are rapidly becoming one of prog rock’s big beasts, and this album shows why that is.
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