May 30 - June 6, 1 9 9 6

Steeleye Span: Music for Badgers

Since they first started playing jigs and reels with wah-wahs and fuzzboxes 26 years ago, it's been Steeleye Span's goal to make contemporary music out of English traditional songs. With their new album -- Time (Shanachie), the band's first studio disc in seven years -- they've perhaps succeeded better than they planned. Slower and more ominous than any previous Steeleye album, Time is packed with spectral musical settings, haunting harmonies, and ballads about teenage pregnancy, witch trials, magic rituals, and knights who get eaten by crows. It sounds more suited for a goth-identified label like 4AD than a folk stronghold like Shanachie.

[Steeleye Span] "I haven't heard of 4AD, but any knowledge I have of current music would have to come from my 15-year-old son and my 11-year-old daughter," admits singer Maddy Prior by phone from England. And when asked why Steeleye covered a song made relatively famous by the Pogues ("Gentleman Soldier," on their 1992 live album Tonight's the Night), she admits to not knowing about the Pogues version. "We're a bit like badgers, really; we've never noticed what other bands are doing, because we're busy plowing our own furrow."

The new album brings back the drama that got toned down after Steeleye's landmark '70s albums, along with the sex and violence. The opening "Prickly Bush" is based on the same traditional song that Zeppelin lifted for "Gallows Pole," but with different results. Zeppelin's antihero gets cut loose to pillage his way back home; Steeleye's is left dangling until the last chorus. The witch-trial song "You Will Burn" is genuinely creepy, being sung from the inquisitors' point of view. And the deceptively lovely, fiddle-driven "The Elf-Knight" tells of an elfin O.J. Simpson who finally gets what's coming.

"Death isn't an area we avoid, and we're quite un-English in that respect," notes Prior. "The more frightening those songs are, the more power they have." Prior's love for the tradition has largely kept her from singing contemporary songs, save for a few handfuls that she and other bandmembers have written. "I find it quite difficult to sing contemporary songs, unless I know the writer. What I love about traditional music is that it's so onion-like; there are archetypal layers and many different levels you can take the songs at. Especially the ballads; I find them very colorful and emotional, and it's hard to write that kind of song yourself. There's a quality and depth there that has to do with time. I've probably heard every traditional song at some point in my career; but just when you think you've exhausted the canon, another one comes along and you say, `Ah, that one's nice, I'd forgotten about it.' "

The group will sound notably different when they hit the Somerville Theatre next week, since they've lately been rejoined by charter member Gay Woods (who was in the short-lived original Steeleye with then-husband Terry Woods, later of the Pogues). Woods figures in Time's most pointed number and its only playful one, "The Old Maid in the Garret." One of the less enlightened children's rhymes in the English songbooks, it expresses dread at the prospect of growing older without a husband. Knowing a feminist opening when they hear one, Prior and Woods filter the usual angelic tones out of their voices and cackle for all they're worth while the band slide into one of their trademark rocked-up jigs. Trashing the song's sentiments without changing a word, these old maids just want to have fun.

-- Brett Milano

(Steeleye Span play the Somerville Theatre Wednesday, June 5. Call 776-2004.)