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cury should appeal to a wider audience, with- out alienating her many existing fans. You’ll be hearing more of this album, I don’t doubt.
siobhanmiller.com With the mysteriously titled Hieroglyphs
That Tell The Tale, Karan Casey is moving in the opposite direction to Siobhan Miller. Karan’s last album Two More Hours was all her own songs, while this one is mainly covers of other songwriters, and very good it is too. Right from the beginning she lays it on the line, opening with Hollis Brown, which builds up with banjo, doomy piano and finally surg- ing strings, driving her and the song on to the inevitable impending disaster – a song just as relevant today. The band uses rather more chords than Dylan’s original almost single- chord version, and it’s a masterpiece of arrangement. Things immediately slow down afterwards with her own Down In The Glen, a traditional-sounding song related to the East- er Rising, with Michael McGoldrick weaving his flute round some downright beautiful singing. Equally gorgeous is her delicate treatment of Janis Ian’s I’m Still Standing Here, with Maura O’Connor and Karen Math- eson on harmony vocals (a class act if ever there was one!), while the only traditional song Sixteen Come Sunday is given an unusu- ally attention-grabbing setting.
From her own Hold On with wailing trum- pet, to Patty Griffin’s poignant and enigmatic Mary, the thing that really marks this album out (apart from that voice) is the superb and carefully plotted arrangement. Admittedly a world-class cast list of musicians and backing vocalists makes it easier, but a superb produc- tion job from Donald Shaw that’s edgy and/or laid back in just the right places makes the album a tour-de-force. The more I play Hiero- glyphs… the more I think this is probably the best Karan Casey album yet.
verticalrecords.co.uk Bob Walton
STEVE ASHLEY One More Thing Market Square MSMCD205
One More Thing is a collection of eleven brand-new self-penned songs offering typi- cally insightful and up-to-the-minute per- spectives on the state of our nation, sharply observed and couched in Steve’s inimitably quirky and distinctive presentation that owes equal allegiance to contemporary and traditional folk stylings. It’s an honest, direct one-to-one home-based recording, just vox- plus-guitar with occasional harmonica – but that’s all that’s needed for optimum conver- sational intimacy.
All human life is grist to Steve’s mill, where quite barbed commentary is laced with delectably gentle-but-firm good humour in a way that ensures the listener takes inspiration rather than offence – which for overtly political songwriting is a consider- able achievement. Questionable motives are candidly examined with all due gravity and sensitivity (The White Helmets), while on the other hand you’d be hard put not to raise a chuckle or more at Steve’s observations on the likes of May and Trump and the Royal Windsors. That said, he also scores an unerring bullseye when taking aim at less specifically identifiable targets, which inevitably include the omnipresent warmon- gering politicians and leaders of any political persuasion who seek to manage our lives. Steve’s generous appraisal also gains our sym- pathy through his expression of optimism and hope in the face of it all, firstly when we Stand Together and secondly if we can only
Agricantus
Get Real. This is masterly British songwriting with all the bite of challenge.
The album title may signify that Steve intends this to be his final album – but hey, he’s sure going out fighting!
steveashley.co.uk David Kidman
AGRICANTUS Akoustikòs Vol 1 CNI CNDL 30105
BALARÚ Gravure Felmay 8245
Two well-established Italian quartets from different ends of the country come up with very different approaches.
Agricantus have gone through regular changes of personnel and direction since they were formed in the late 1970s; there have even been two distinct groups operating under this name. They have embraced elec- tronica and laid-back ambient approaches as well. Their approach has always been sophis- ticated and embraced a pan-Mediterranean outlook whilst having cultural Sicily and par- ticularly Palermo at the root of their thinking. The greatest assets of the current line-up are the woodwind (“archaic wind instruments” is how they are described in the booklet) played by long-term member Mario Crispi but particularly the arresting voice of lead singer Anita Vitale. Her contribution also includes some neat work on keyboards. They both combine well with sensitive input from the string bass and drums, or perhaps we should say percussion because Giovanni Lo Cascio brings a great variety to the proceedings. Most of the music here is composed by Crispi in collaboration with bassist Mario Riviera, ranging as it does through conventional song to impressionistic soundscapes.
cnimusic.it
Balarú, by contrast, sound and operate much more like a conventional folk group. They have researched songs and tunes from early field recording and manuscript sources of various parts of the Piedmont, the area that borders France, Switzerland and The Gulf of Genoa.
Their instruments are accordeon, hurdy- gurdy flute/bagpipes and banjo/bouzouki. Is this starting to sound like a Euro-dance unit? Well, all needs to be added is that their name translates as “dance lovers” in the Pietmon- tese dialect. The booklet gives meticulous details of the sources of each item (in Italian and English) and the press release has an almost missionary zeal to their efforts to proselytise their music. If this makes them sound a bit over-serious and academic, it shouldn't. Their enthusiastic and joyous play- ing and singing, particularly the ensemble sections, arises from each track. Their con- certs and dances must be great fun.
felmay.it Vic Smith
DOLPHIN BOY The Highland Swing Skye SRCDX005
No, this isn’t a sequence of whistles and trills intelligible only to our bottlenosed brethren; Dolphin Boy is Edinburgh-based producer and DJ Andy Levy. Levy’s decks began spin- ning at the height of “acid croft”, when the likes of Martyn Bennett were turning heads, raising eyebrows and breaking dancefloors with their folk-dance music juggernaut. The Highland Swing retreads this path by remix- ing two albums by Iain Copeland’s band Sketch, Highland Time and Shed Life. The pipes, whistles, fiddles and guitar of the origi- nal recordings are here crossbred with big beats and an array of wryly humorous sam- ples. On Ghetto Pipe, a barrage of questions about bagpipes are answered with a dead- pan “I don’t know”, while on Kicks, some American bloke reels off a litany of naughty activities and STDs. However, those in search of blazing originality may recall that the tech- no-beat treatment of the Scots Gaelic song Seinn O Churadail, heard here on One More Tune, was first done way back in 1990 on Mouth Music’s debut album. With new kids on the block like Niteworks blazing fresh trails for electronic folk, this album stands more as a memento of acid croft’s vivacious iconoclasm when ‘twas new.
skyrecords.com Clare Button
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