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CD No: RUFCD10 by Chris Wood called The Lark Descending. Released: 2005

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The Review: ' Sensational! ... the album's going to be a milestone up there with the likes of Penguin Eggs and A Handful Of Earth and so good it's absolutely guaranteed to not win a Folk Award. ' Ian Anderson

Radio 3 - World Roots Playlist Number 1 - June
fRoots - Playlist Number 1 - July
MOJO - Folk album of the month - August

MOJO - Five Star Review
Entirely solo Wood offers a uniquely sensitive meeting of old and nu folk.
A lot of wimpy garbage is being hailed as part of a brave new world for folk music - they might want to listen to this guy. In a warm, dark brown voice with sparse, minimalist accompaniment, Wood is an intimate storyteller, applying such nuance and gravitas to every phrase you are imperceptibly lured into his world. Some of the stories are old - John Barleycorn, Our Captain Calls and, especially, Lord Bateman are familiar traditional tales born anew with fresh, bold arrangements. Yet what perhaps marks this album as one of the best of the year is Wood's own songs. Whether about his daughter (Hard), suicide (Albion) or a chip shop (One in a Million), he seamlessly knits the spirit of the tradition into his very contemporary parables. And it's magnificent. Colin Irwin

The Irish Times - Four Star Review
Solo recordings don't come more solitary than this one form the Renaissance man of English folk, Chris Wood.  His is a world populated by glorious minor chords, life-affirming songs and stomach-churning tales of urban decay.  It's a stark terrain he navigates, melding his own tales of fatherly affection (Hard) and alienation (Albion) with an uncannily timely reading of the traditional Our Captain Calls all Hands, a four-minute distillation of the idiocy of warfare. "How can you go abroad fighting for strangers?", a question as apt in Downing Street as it is in dimly lit folk clubs.  Wood's ferocious musicality is everywhere: from the fiery cello scaffolding John Barleycorn to the somnolent guitar of Bleary Winter. 
Unapologetically and quintessentially English - and unmissable.
Siobhan Long

fRoots - July Mixing his own extraordinary songs seamlessly into exhilarating adaptations of traditional material, this is unquestionably one of the albums of the year. He has a deceptively laid-back style, an entirely solo album of seemingly straightforward accompaniments but he invests the words with such gravitas - even the more comedic lines - that you are instantly sucked into the narrative. The seriousness of the approach doesn't always equate with the mood of the song and initially creates the impression of an ultra-heavy album -the warmth, charm and pride of a father's love for his daughter in the opening track Hard, is initially deflected by the solemn delivery before the full impact of the lyrics seeps through. But as we become accustomed to his style and adjust to the persuasive directiveness of his singing, we enter an intimate, inclusive atmosphere of gentle intelligence that is very special.
The greatest challenge for any contemporary folk song is does it bear comparison to a traditional song? Having made a fine art out of arranging trad songs in a fresh manner - his wondrous arrangement of Lord Bateman previously featured on a Wood, Wilson & Carthy album and controversially used by Jim Moray is included - Wood knows very well those stringent demands. He meets them all with the extraordinary Albion, a disquieting tale which tells of finding a hanged man on a tree and relating it to Thatcher's Britain.
It's also an album that holds together far more tightly than most, almost thematic in the way the songs weave into each other amid a running overview of English life. Albion is followed by Bleary Winter, one of two songs written with Hugh Lupton, commentating further on a bleak aspect of cultural history; and he follows Lord Bateman with his second Hugh Lupton collaboration, One In A Million, which also centres around someone called Bateman (and his daughter Peggy Sue!). This Bateman runs a fish and chip shop and the very modern parable Wood gradually unveils with patent relish is worthy of Richard Thompson, so vivid the characters and so cinematic the narrative. An epic that runs for nearly 10 minutes, it must surely be in the frame for song of the year.
On slightly more familiar territory, he also turns out committed versions of Our Captain Calls All Hands and John Barleycorn before ending in relatively rousing fashion with the life-affirming Walk This World With Music. With a radically different treatment it could be an anthemic chorus song to end them all, but with a trundling fiddle, Wood chooses to offer it as a clarion call of optimistic defiance that offers a stirring coda to the bleakness that is a key ingredient to all that's gone before. It leaves you with plenty to think about.
Colin Irwin.

The Times
...it is his own compositions, which share the same timeless quality as Richard Thompson's best writing, that make this CD special. Most striking of all is Albion
Nigel Williamson Key words:

The Band: Chris Wood United Kingdom

Band members:
610 Chris Wood (Fiddles, Guitar, Vocals) 169


CD Tracks: 1. Hard
2. Albion
3. Bleary Winter
4. Lord Bateman
5. One in a Million
6. Our Captain Calls
7. John Barleycorn
8. Walk this World