**2025 Stock** The first thing that hits in The North Star Grassman and the Ravens is the sense of aftermath: the hush after a band dissolves, the air still charged with arguments and unfinished songs. Emerging from the collapse of Fotheringay and late-60s Fairport turbulence, Sandy Denny turns those loose ends into a starkly poetic solo debut, leaning less on tradition and more on a private mythology of sea voyages, premonitory dreams and damaged men trying to outrun their own legends. Built largely from her own compositions, the album sketches a new axis for British folk rock, one that refuses both pastoral comfort and rock’s swagger in favour of something more oblique, haunted and inwardly lit.

Across these 11 tracks, Denny’s writing tightens and darkens. “Late November,” born from a dream and the trauma of Fairport drummer Martin Lamble’s death, opens the record like a foghorn: warning, mournful, strangely beautiful. “John the Gun,” salvaged from the unfinished Fotheringay 2, turns the outlaw ballad inside out, less concerned with action than with the exhausted psychology of its antihero. Elsewhere, “The Sea Captain” and the title track lean into maritime imagery, the latter casting a voyage as a veiled meditation on mortality inspired by the loss of a Merchant Navy friend; the ravens circling above feel less symbolic garnish than emissaries, witnesses to a crossing that cannot be reversed.

The sound of The North Star Grassman and the Ravens is deceptive in its modesty. Recorded in spring 1971, it surrounds Denny’s voice and guitar with Richard Thompson’s quietly expressive lines, Gerry Conway’s measured drumming, and an ensemble that understands when to step forward and when to vanish. Harry Robinson’s strings appear sparingly - on “Next Time Around,” a coded portrait of former lover Jackson C. Frank, and “Wretched Wilbur,” a character study with a crooked grin - adding a cinematic shimmer that never tips into sentimentality. Even the covers are carefully chosen misdirections: Bob Dylan’s “Down in the Flood” is recast as rolling, stoic defiance, while “Let’s Jump the Broomstick” injects a grin of rockabilly mischief, a reminder that Denny’s sense of play survives inside all this gravitas.

What holds the record together is a mood: a kind of lucid melancholy that never folds into self-pity. Traditional material like “Blackwaterside” feels less like a quota-paying folk standard than a dark mirror in which her originals glance at their ancestry. The gatefold cover - Denny weighing seeds in an old-fashioned shop, an image that looks suspiciously like she is divining futures in tea leaves - spells out the album’s preoccupation with fate, chance and the small rituals used to make sense of them. Contemporary and later critics have repeatedly called this her best album, noting its “deceptive simplicity” and its resistance to the more grandiose arrangements that would shape her mid-70s work; you hear a writer still close to the ground, testing just how far her songs can reach without losing their earth underfoot.

Released in 1971, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens stands as a statement of intent: Denny claiming her place not just as an interpreter of tradition but as a modern songwriter whose images linger like fragments of a half-remembered ballad. The touring band that followed - Denny with Thompson, Conway and bassist Dave Richards - extended the album’s taut, low-key electricity onto the stage, reinforcing the sense that this music was meant to breathe, not be entombed in studio gloss. Hearing it now, the record feels uncannily contemporary: the elliptical lyrics, the refusal of easy catharsis, the way grief and humour share the same cramped space. It is a debut that already sounds like a reckoning, with the north star fixed and the ravens circling patiently overhead.