The Rails are a new duo specialising in folk-rock, although the term "new" is used advisedly. The male half of the pair has been playing guitar for long enough to have been hailed a "teenage prodigy" after working with everyone from Son Volt and the Pernice Brothers to Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Davies, the Pogues and the Pretenders (Mojo called him a rock Zelig, a neat way of capturing his ubiquity). He even recorded a solo album for Heavenly, prompting Nick Hornby to describe him as "an unearthly cross between James Burton, Peter Green and Richard Thompson". "Walbourne's fluid, tasteful, beautiful solos drop the jaw, stop the heart, and smack the gob, all at the same time," proclaimed Hornby, one of the greatest music writers ever to be named after a toy train company.
Talking of Richard Thompson, the female half of the Rails is vaguely related to him, and by vaguely we mean she's his – and Linda Thompson's – daughter (as well as Teddy Thompson's sister, we have just ingeniously surmised). It was Hornby who gave Walbourne his pass into British folk-rock's foremost dynasty when he introduced him to La Thompson. Through her he met Kami when they both worked on Linda's 2007 album Versatile Heart – and they later recorded together, before going on the Rails, as Dead Flamingoes. Her own CV is pretty full, including stints touring with Sean Lennon and Bonnie "Prince" Billy and issuing her own solo album, Love Lies, in 2011.
Together, Walbourne and Thompson, who got married in 2012, are a force worth taking seriously, a fact concluded by Island Records, who decided to reactivate the Pink Label for their benefit. And so it is that Fair Warning, the Rails' debut album, will be released on the same imprint that gave us classics by John Martyn, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention. It was also produced by Edwyn Collins, that other legendary folkie (well, he did used to wear his fringe like Roger McGuinn's), and features Eliza Carthy on fiddle. Carthy must have been exhausted because there's a lot of fiddle on the record. Maybe that's why they called it Fair Warning. The instrument is used to decorate, or just plain deliver, a mixture of traditional and original songs, the latter unearthed from the famous folk archive at Cecil Sharp House. They chose songs "so icky, and potent, and heart-wrenching, they could have been written 500 years or 10 minutes ago, it doesn't matter". The other proviso was that the arrangements should be simple, even simplistic: "Singing, fiddle, electric guitar, no tricks" – that was their want-list. "You can hear everything, it's bare," they've said. "It's hard to convince people to make a record like that now but the sound is fantastic, it's so direct."
Fair Warning could, we suppose, give or take some of the technology, have come out at any point since Liege and Lief in 1969, which means, give or take some of the production, it could have been sung on street corners at any point since 1569, or whenever Olde Englishe Folke was the music du jour. There are vernacular interventions from the modern era, though. On Breakneck Speed Thompson gives someone "props" and mentions her "fragile, fucked-up heart", not a term used in many madrigals, but we could be wrong. William Taylor – which sounds like a lightly rocked-up version of a trad arr ballad – is, Thompson explains, "the ultimate bitch revenge fantasy for every guy you've had a shit time from", to coin a phrase from the Middle Ages. Panic Attack Blues alludes to Xanax, caffeine and cocaine and feeling "strung-out and left all alone". It also has what they used to call a lyrical guitar solo, such is its eloquent expression of the protagonist's pain ("I'm giving up, I'm checking out … It's time to leave these earthly shores"). Many of the songs seem to be about that hardy perennial, the fall-out from degraded male-female relations. "Our long-term goal is to make the perfect divorce album, obviously," joked Thompson. From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/10/the-rails-new-band-of-the-day
