> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Owl Service :: Tied to the Land - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/the-owl-service-tied-to-the-land/ - Published: 2026-10-18T05:48:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-18T12:56:07.000Z - Description: Psych folk: murder ballads slowed down by the slowcore of 1994. - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Folk, Psych Folk ### While arranging traditional English ballads, Steven Collins listened to nothing but three American records from 1994\. Tied to the Land grows out of that strange graft: the old songbook played at the pace of those who had learned slowness in American halls and clubs. --- The name still comes from Alan Garner’s novel and from the Granada series that, at the end of the Sixties, set an ancient Welsh myth inside a holiday house. Born in 2006 as a studio project for Collins, the group has passed through a long suspension, a label closed under the weight of its own workload, a two-CD retrospective, *Always We Are Destroyed*. *Tied to the Land* is their first record of new material in over a decade. Jason Steel, Diana Collier and Nancy Wallace are gone; in their place two voices, Dorothy Chappell and Rebecca Leivers, and around them Julian Overall’s saxophone, Joolie Wood’s violin and recorder. The press release promises a body count higher than the average slasher film, and it is hard to argue with: drowned lovers, arranged marriages that end in mourning, a boy dragged beneath the sea. “Bonnie Boy” opens the record as a folk rock anthem and holds that shape from the first bars, with something, strange as it may sound in this context, of “Another Brick in the Wall”. Julian Overall’s saxophone brands the moments where Rebecca Leivers’ voice closes the chorus, and the folk begins to give off progressive radiation. In “Bonny at Morn” the vocal line, with its flavour of early music, is stretched over the gait of slowcore and works as a vehicle towards distant times; the guitars, in full chords, keep the song anchored to the New World instead, to the American clubs and studios of 1994. [Tied to the Land by The Owl Service](https://theowlservice.bandcamp.com/album/tied-to-the-land?ref=hwaelmag.com) The two interludes, “Revolt from the Monolith, Come Back to the Village” and “Herald the Blacksmith, Birdsong & Juno”, occupy a curious position in the architecture of the record. They carry the numbers 15 and 16, as if they were fragments of a longer sequence of which we are allowed to hear only a part. The first carries a title that reads like a programme, and inside there are squelchy synths, Mellotron strings and fragments of *Penda’s Fen*, the 1974 film by Alan Clarke and David Rudkin that turned the Midlands into a landscape of pagan visions. In the second, hauntological synths marry birdsong and bells, while a guitar undercuts the sentence they seem about to pass. “Maids & Gentlemen” moves more than the rest: the drums run in double time, and for the only time on the record the singing bends to the rhythm of the music and follows it, like a fairground storyteller quickening the tale to keep up with the drum. The fuzz guitars, meanwhile, advance with good manners, respectful of the historic surfaces they rest on. The sax takes an experimental solo that escapes every genre named so far, but that is a reviewer’s label: inside the song everything stays in its place. “The Mermaid of Zennor” almost closes the circle. Voice and organ are its backbone, and on that frame the piece holds like a folk operetta until the ending, when with unexpected naturalness an aside opens: sax, guitars and rhythm section digress without sliding into mournful liturgy, a craftsman’s interlude, in the best workshop sense. The band gathers itself again and finishes together, where the lyric line and the organ meet once more inside the group’s slowest gait. GROUND SECTION / 01 SELECT A LAYER 01 THE SONGBOOK repertoires / records / ballads 02 THE HOUSE Leigh-on-Sea / home recording / Hobby-Horse 03 THE TEMPO Codeine / Low / Bedhead 04 THE PEW Zennor / St Senara / mermaid The songs arrive having already passed through other voices. Nine traditional pieces, chosen largely from the less-sung end of the repertoire. The declared sources are records: the repertoires of Shirley Collins, Ray Fisher, Toni Arthur, Michael Raven and Joan Mills, Midwinter and Stone Angel, Joan Baez, Brenda Wootton. The tie to the land runs first through an archive of recordings, and only then through places. The record was made where the band lives. The Owl Service produced the album at home and release it on their own label, Hobby-Horse. Steven Collins also mixed and mastered it. The group is based in Leigh-on-Sea, on the Thames estuary, and this record marks twenty years since its formation. The ballads take their pace from another geography. During the recording, beyond the folk sources, Collins says he listened only to three records from 1994: Codeine's White Birch, Low's I Could Live in Hope, Bedhead's WhatFunLifeWas. American slowcore, in his account, is most audible in "The Trees They Do Grow High", "Female Rambling Sailor" and "Bonny at Morn". A legend anchored to a piece of carved wood. "The Mermaid of Zennor" tells of the mermaid who takes a village boy beneath the sea. The story belongs to the church of St Senara at Zennor, on the West Penwith peninsula, where a carved mermaid still decorates an old bench end. The song, written by Richard Gendall, reaches the band through Brenda Wootton's repertoire. WHAT REMAINS These layers document sources and working conditions, not sound. The slowcore influence is Collins' own statement; the dating of the Zennor carving varies between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries depending on the source; how much of the land actually remains in the record, only listening can say. The fuzz garage-folk register lives here alongside slowcore, folk, old tales and psychedelia, and none of these elements insists on being noticed. Everything is measured with balance, and it is the two voices that hold it together: without Chappell and Leivers, the record would seem smaller. *Tied to the Land* comes out under catalogue number HHTE-028, on a label named after the wooden horse of the May festivals. In Cornwall, at Padstow, the Obby ‘Oss still goes out into the streets every first of May, danced by those who inherited it from their fathers, and returns to its room until the following year. These twelve songs share the same fate: brought out, played, put away with care, so that someone else will find them. ---