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stretch out the words. It’s an extraordinary performance and one that really hits home. But even this is trumped by Dave Davies’ fin- de-siècle ennui-laden version of After The Ball. It drips with sadness and regret and is as good as anything he’s recorded.
The digipak and liner booklet, as well as information on lyrics and musicians, is beauti- fully illustrated with pictures of the songs’ original sheet music. This is clearly a labour of love by Paul Marsteller and Gabriel Rhodes and one that has paid off handsomely with a superb and thought-provoking album. Hope- fully there will be a Volume 2 in due course.
www.thebeautifulold.com Jeremy Searle
ALEKSEY ARKHIPOVSKIY The Road Home Own Label HB 169
Largely because of Russian state ways of doing things, the balalaika (itself standard- ised for state ensemble use) has often been a tool for extreme stagey flashiness; demon- strations of undoubted skill and years of prac- tice, but formulaic and tasteless. Some – par- ticularly the great Mikhail Rozhkov, still play- ing in his 90s, have transcended that, combin- ing brilliance with genuine musical soul.
Today’s Paganini of the balalaika, Alexey
Arkhipovskiy, has come through the state folk-music education and ensemble system but now tours internationally as a virtuoso soloist, the sound of his instrument enhanced with wide-screen delayed-reverb. What he gets out of the three strings is amazing, but looking at his videos and seeing the profes- sional-looking impish smile I got the impres- sion of some kind of balalaika puppet, and said as much to his agent. She assured me that there’s more to him, and the smile is
genuine, and in due course this new CD has arrived, recorded at two concerts in the enor- mous Moscow International House of Music.
The booklet photos show a rather jolly, curly-haired unpretentious chap favouring colourful informal garb in offstage moments around the world. Though he does briefly quote the inevitable Song Of the Volga Boatmen in the opening track, a show is a show and the ability to wordlessly hold the attention of a large audience for a whole concert using just a small triangular box with three strings is an achievement in itself and needs some ‘listen to me’ setting-up. He does indeed go on to create a varied, intense flow of original and sensitive music, including plenty of reflective, hushed, deli- cate slow playing as well as dazzlingly rapid tours-de-force.
www.arkhipovskiy.com Andrew Cronshaw
THE CEDARS Little Copper Still Clubhouse CRUK005CD
The Cedars, four English acoustic musicians, are hardly the first non-citizens to conjure up a parallel-universe vision of the USA. Most famously, decades ago The Band – all but one a Canadian – invented a fantastical American South on Music From Big Pink. Not that Little Copper Still is another Pink. Still, Still is an improvement over any number of ‘Ameri- cana’ records cut by Americans whose com- mand of native musical traditions rarely reaches back even to, well, Big Pink.
The title of Withering Pines nods to the
Band’s Whisperin’ Pines (and, perhaps, to the earlier Johnny Horton country-folk song). Like much of the production the Cedars’ Pines is banjo driven, in this case in service to a
murder ballad, coloured dark green and black just like the cover art. Soon enough, the sound turns clattery, percussive, and busy. Had the Band been a folk band, something like this would have been a stand-out cut on an alternate-reality Pink.
The Cedars, on the other hand, wisely eschew Dylanesque surrealism for reasonably straightforward narratives spooling out of mountain melodies and Delta blues, acknowl- edged throughout in the dozen original cuts (plus hidden extra). The non-traditional arrangements, however, work off a jittery contemporary energy as vocal, banjo, guitar, and drums battle for supremacy. Sometimes, it’s difficult to discern Chantal Hill’s words amid the clash to gain the front.
Occasionally, that’s just as well. Consid-
er, alas, the opening line of Johnny Davey, urged to “put on your blue suede shirt/Come to the Dairy Queen”. Though a lifelong resident of America’s northern tier, I am certain that nobody south of the Mason- Dixon line is named ‘Johnny Davey’, who apparently has strayed in from a Child bal- lad. Nor have I heard the phrase ‘blue suede shirt’. And the strange invitation to the ice- milk franchise may indicate only that a Cedar once read a Bobbie Ann Mason short story while failing to grasp that its small- town Southern characters’ obsession with cheesy brand names is intended to be satiri- cal. That of the Cedars, on the other hand, appears distressingly earnest.
Yet, the occasional blunder notwith-
standing, Little Copper Still is an often lovely record, dreaming of a South as fantastically engaging as the one another non-Southerner, Stephen Foster, made up… only in this one people seem a lot more nervous.
www.thecedarsonline.com Jerome Clark
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