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AMY RAY Holler Daemon DAM19061-2
Indigo Girl Amy Ray pulls out all the stops for her sixth solo album. Not just more big names in American roots music than you can shake a stick at – Vince Gill, Alison Brown, Brandi Carlile, Derek Trucks – but a tour through everything from bluegrass to that deep-fried Southern rock. But Ray was raised in the South and lives in Georgia; all this is perfectly natural to her, and given the length of her career, the full scope of Americana falls with- in her vision. There are horns a-plenty, and many sparks that skitter through the air, along with some fine playing (Brown’s banjo on Dadgum Down is a jaw-dropping delight, and Trucks’ electric slide guitar solo work on Bondsman is terrifyingly good) and singing.
Sometimes it seems as if it’s trying too hard, and the only thing missing is the kitchen sink. There’s no real room to breathe in the arrangements; they strangle the songs in detail, overwhelm them. That’s a shame, because Ray has a wonderfully raw, passion- ate voice, and the songs are good, solid, heartfelt. In short, there’s nothing at all wrong with this album. It would simply have benefitted from a sparer sound to let what’s underneath truly shine through.
amy-ray.com Chris Nickson
THE TRIALS OF CATO Hide & Hair Via Water 070000 113104
Energetic, innovative and dynamic, the press blurb hailing Trials Of Cato as a band that “arrived fully formed” is not just PR hype in this instance. Hide & Hair is a bona fide sweep-you-off-your-feet debut. The three young men from Yorkshire and North Wales met in Beirut while teaching, quickly enthused audiences in Lebanon and arrived back in the UK two years ago. With Hide & Hair they deliver us a lovely blend of man- dolin, banjo, bouzouki and guitar, their stun- ning instrumentation and rich harmonising vocals breathing new life into traditional songs and tunes.
Older songs like My Love’s In Germany, the seventeenth-century window’s lament for a fallen soldier, and Tom Paine’s Bones, Gra- ham Moore’s rousing anthem for rights and liberty, rub shoulders with new songs like the
The Trials Of Cato
equally rousing These Are The Things. Of the instrumental pieces, Difyrrwch is the band’s arrangement of three traditional Welsh and English melodies while Kadisha is their own composition inspired by and named after a valley in northern Lebanon.
The trio are Robin Jones (mandolin/tenor banjo/vocals), William Addison (Irish bouzou- ki/vocals) and Tomos Williams (guitar/vocals) with Addison and Jones alternating lead vocal duties across the album.
Few debuts have as much vitality and impact as this one and they have already been receiving plaudits from the likes of the BBC’s Mark Radcliffe, who has lauded them as “one of the real discoveries on the folk circuit in recent times”. We shall certainly be hear- ing a lot more of The Trials Of Cato.
thetrialsofcato.com Darren Johnson
SOUAD ASLA Lemma Buda Musique 6753551
“A meeting between women artists from Algeria’s Saoura region,” a cultural crossroads where “Bedouin music and Berber tempos are, over a history bruised by slavery, impreg- nated with African music from the Gnawas.”
Souad Asla is a South Algerian singer- songwriter hailed as “the heiress of the Gnawa tradition,” while Lemma are a ten- strong group, all of whom sing and play per- cussion – except the redoubtable-looking twangista Hasna El Becharia, who excels on six-string banjo and guembri.
For Asla, this album marks a return to the region of her birth and the music of her childhood. For Lemma – ‘guardians of a tem- poral tradition’ – it offers an opportunity to push the boundaries of this previously hidden musical identity and reveal their artistry to a wider audience. The results of their collabo- ration are both primal and sophisticated in their appeal; gorgeous vocals in dense layers of harmony over hypnotic rhythms and the grooviest of riffs.
The 35-page booklet notes (in both French and English) are comprehensive and fascinating, while the superb colour pho- tographs lend this highly desirable artefact the appearance of a miniature coffee-table book.
budamusique.com Steve Hunt
SAIL PATTERN Seven Years Sail Pattern
Deceptively understated in design, this EP holds great promise; it’s all guitars and rock of differing stripes wrapped tight round trad lyrics and folksy sounding articles. Sail Pattern have previously released proper-sized albums which have built up to this not inconsiderable smaller portion of fun. The feature track is the title slice, researched and composed by them- selves; a tale of transportation for the pettiest of crimes, where all comes right when deter- mination conquers previous ills. There’s plenty of drive and snazzy, crackling guitar leads.
Claiming no particular influence but drawing from whatever they fancy as inspira- tion, there’s a groovy instrumental, Wonky’s, all spiralling and medieval sounding, and Rio Grande, a rollicking shanty with a high-per- centage rock input. Closer Hard Times Of Old England (A Better Land) shows contemporary concerns and a social conscience, with a subtle fiddle echoing the lead guitar. Vocalist Joe Alderson’s voice is expressive without overkill, and he does a creditable job. All involved deserve a pat on the collective back; the EP was laid down in the wonderfully hip Giant Wafer studio, produced it seems by commit- tee. Investigation is recommended.
thesailpattern.com Simon Jones
LIGHTGARDEN
And There’s A Silver Stream Cascading Lightgarden LG03
The tremendously inventive Whitby-based trio Banoffi, fronted by singer and fiddle/bouzouki player David Moss, lasted just seven years until 2002. Following the band’s demise, Moss relocated to Trowbridge, later forming Lightgarden with Masha Käst- ner and releasing their debut album (Travel- ling Light) in 2009. The duo has since expand- ed to a four-piece with Bath-based guitarist Rob Colquhoun and The Joyce Gang’s Dave McKeown on clarinet and sax, and lovingly crafted this new album, whose finely detailed, uncluttered recording reveals an enticing kaleidoscope of delights.
Lightgarden’s music is (genuinely) origi- nal, notwithstanding its evident roots both in various traditional musics and
experimental/psych folk. Moss‘s unmistakable, haunting voice and fiery, imaginative instru- mental proficiency provide the obvious link with Banoffi days, and his compositions often inhabit a slightly dreamy, gently animated state (recalling Forest or early ISB). Lightgar- den’s more aromatic and evocative creations Special Wine, Away and in particular the reworked Banoffi favourite Bluebells comple- ment the limpidly atmospheric Walking In The Dark and the extended easternism of Sophia, with a sense of abandon in the melding of Russian and middle-eastern “wonky rhythms” on Minka (one of the album’s four instrumen- tals). Lightgarden’s expanded line-up enables a fruitfully integrated exploration of interest- ing texturings, on the improvised Summer Rain stretching out into jazz. But then, the delicious mandolin/church-organ duet San Benedetto could be from the ISB’s Be Glad soundtrack, for all that it later opens out into Mike Oldfield territory.
Lightgarden be pure magic; indeed (you might say) “it gets no better than this” attractively, artily packaged disc.
lightgardenmusic.co.uk David Kidman
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