Bill Morris: In the Limestone Country (digital outlets)

Singer-songwriter Bill Morris (also a film-maker) hasn't appeared at Elsewhere for quite a while.

In fact it has been a decade since we heaped praise on his impressive folk-cum-country album Hinterland which in places turned a harsh spotlight on lives on the margins of society.

A decade ago No Depression magazine in the US also spoke highy of Morris' songwriting: “Even [Nashville] songwriters would not want to get into the ring with a heavyweight like Bill Morris. If they did, they’d have to bring their best songs and arrangements and they better not blink.”

We did mention in our review he could also be a bit of a sentimentalist . . . and that comes to the fore here as he reflects on the leaving of the homeland of Britain (Orphans of the Clyde), the perilous journey to this foreign land (Tales of Shipwrecks), hardships on arrival (Beyond the Main Divide) and the remoteness of An Island Where No Island Should Be.

This is a song cycle of migrants between the leaving of Scotland's Clyde to the final song, a lyric of leaving again in No Safe Harbour.

The theme of this album is slightly problematic because – in addressing the stories of settlers coming here – it is in a tradition which is, at the least, unfashionable currently as we discuss colonialism, and the body of work in that genre is small and much overlooked.

There hasn't been much research into that musical tradition.

In the Seventies the folk singer/researcher Neil Colquhoun, Phil Garland and others released the double album Songs of a Young Country and Mike Harding's listing of songs in When the Pakeha Sings of Home in '92 was another stake in the ground of that research.

Chris Bourke's Blue Smoke is always a go-to text.

More recently Chris Priestley and friends have explored the stories and songs of early settlers (and sometimes unsettling figures) and Te Radar has delivered excellent shows and television programmes peering into the characters of our past.

Morris picks up these threads in narratives of antipodean colonisers, seal hunters, bandits (the murderous figure in The Rook) and more contemporary reminiscences (the sound collage and spoken word nostalgia of This Town).

It should work better than it does but Morris' wordiness and the joyless topics (Davy Lowston especially dark) can make for an earnest, downbeat journey.

Morris from Southland has made an album which speaks of those who weren't really colonisers in the demonised sense the description is used today, but more just pilgrims looking for work and a new life, some men haunted by the past or making nasty decisions in the present.

Morris - with a band which includes Dave Khan on guitars and violin, Steve and Paul Harrop (bass, accordion respectively), John Joe Kelly (bodhran) and backing vocalist Hollie McPhee --  presents the hardships of their lives in a slightly declamatory manner to emphasize the roughness of existence.

So not an easy proposition as an album, but Beyond the Main Divide is a fine entry into the small catalogue of contemporary songs about our pioneers.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here