Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The fertile rich spirit which inside all who come into this world is rarely exercised to its full potential due to circumstance beyond their control, outside influences, like apples on a tree are subject to the varying changes in the weather, the soil, and the nutrition, are always eating away at the soul of the human and dictating just how they can reach out to the sun without allowing the worms of discontent to eat their way through the skin and through to its very core.
We all have the ability to scrump our way-out artistic hunger, to see the bounty of The Fruitful Fells and take what we need to be nourished and offer the fostered cultivation in return of replanting and sowing the seeds of expressions for others to bite down upon; but few actually are willing to do so.
It is with pleasure that the listener will surely greet the new release by Jez Hellard & The Djukella Orchestra, as their album, The Fruitful Fells, places the deeply felt and the heartbeat side by side to produce a set of songs that are unselfish in their motives for drawing breath, and attentive to the times they frame.
As tracks such as the openers Gonna Rise Again and McDonalds For The Mind swing by in a dramatic welcome of attentive felicitations, the album becomes passionate in its story telling, and in the excellent Black Mirror’s Got You, the rightful anger in Foodbanks & Ferraris, For The Sake Of The Day, For Mr. Thomas and the enrapturing finale of The Quiet Joys Of Brotherhood, Jez Hellard & The Djukella Orchestra, and special guests, Ewan Bleach, Alastair Caplin, James Patrick Gavin, Nye Parsons, Piotr Jordan, Mathew Pharaoh, Mike West, Ben Coulthard, Tommie Black-Roff, all combine to make an album that is passionate, observational, and deeply involved in building the bridge between the orchard of ideas and the apple picker who seeks nourishment in a world designed to keep the many hungry.
A wonderful album, one of great depth and insight, musically intelligent and lyrically inspiring; an absolute delight.
Jez Hellard & The Djukella Orchestra release The Fruitful Fells on July 16th.
Ian D. Hall