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OLIVIA CHANEY Shelter Nonesuch 7559793052
Following the success of her dive into folk-rock on the Offa Rex album The Queen Of Hearts, which achieved great success in America par- ticularly (a Grammy nomina- tion, no less), this is an important album for Chaney. A chance, perhaps, to make a
leap into Natalie Merchant territory. No folk-rockery here, then: this is classic
singer-songwriter stuff; that vulnerable, imploring voice on a range of soul-baring songs given low-key, understated accompani- ment, piano mostly to the fore. Understat- ed… though, when one of the accompanists is Thomas Bartlett, turning his hand to mel- lotron here, you know it’s not going to be that straightforward.
She is also an intriguing songwriter –
offering colourful little vignettes of life with- out ever fully revealing her hand and holding enough back to tantalise with some cracking turns of phrase: “Never been a puritan/never liked their wine much” (Colin & Clem); “The language of angels, mussels and sea shells/Is when Pappa sings old ballads, scatters like petals” (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). She has a poet’s pen… romantic, mournful, regretful, heartfelt… with a degree of religious imagery that is fully explored on O Solitude.
Not the sort of thing to get the pulses racing but bleakness has its merits and in a certain mood of melancholia it has its role.
oliviachaney.com Colin Irwin
SAM SWEENEY The Unfinished Violin Island
FLO FLO La Mentirosa SoundFly SF009
From zero to fanboy in a few hours. The jiffy bag dis- charged the theatrically pack- aged CD onto my desk with no accompanying biog or info. Into the player with it – wow, this is special! Oh look, it’s produced by that fantasti- cally talented and visionary
Italian musician Daniele Sepe (fR161 and fRoots 7). Hmm, seems to be her third album. Google and YouTube wormholing ensues; pre- vious albums located and ordered, as is anoth- er by the late great Sicilian singer Rosa Bal- istreri, who is clearly an influence. Excited Facebook conversations take place with Italian friends and music fans. Turns out there are acres of interviews with her (in Italian) on Ciro De Rosa’s Blogfoolk website… such are the ways of us easily distracted music obsessives.
Fingers crossed that I can put you into the same camp. Flo, it says here, is a “singer- songwriter, theatre actress and author”. I try hard to think of an Anglo equivalent to her
big, heartfelt, straight-as-an-arrow but ultra- expressive voice; theatrically constructed songs with constant twists and turns and ref- erences to traditions; and Sepe’s imaginative, multi-instrumentally textured arrange- ments – and the nearest I can come up with would be Eliza Carthy and her Wayward Band. If they were Italian.
Influences cascade from everywhere. Afro-Brazilian percussion, circus sounds, North African oud, Greek hasapiko, a Milton Nasci- mento cover, a tribute to Mexico’s iconic Chavela Vargas (clearly from the same planet as Rosa Balistreri), brass band taranta (the title track), a Neapolitan love song, a spiky and angular guitar-driven rocker straight out of the Amparo Sanchez mould, and just to throw you off your plinth, a couple of pure Eurovi- sion ballads (that’s if Eurovision had quality and taste in its arrangements), one with Sepe’s captivating soprano sax and another with gorgeous harp. But throughout, that voice and such huge imagination. I am in awe!
Hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 70.
soundfly.it
Ian Anderson
Just when you thought the mainstream music industry had abandoned folk music for another generation, at least until the next bright spark decides it’s time for a new anti-fashion fashion statement, here come Island Records signing up Sam
Sweeney. You assume they must have seen him leaping off amp stacks with Bellowhead, charging around the stage with Eliza Carthy or playing drums with Jon Boden but nope, this is an album of fiddle music as pure as pure can be. No frenetic speedsters, no grandstanding production, no artifice what- soever – just tunes. Tunes which remind you that – though not necessarily obvious from Bellowhead, but certainly identifiable in Lev- eret – he’s a lovely fiddle player of real grace and a fine touch.
This, in essence, is a themed follow- up/companion to Made In The Great War, the album and show he toured with such success, telling the story of music hall performer Richard Howard, who was halfway through building a fiddle when called away to fight for king and country. His death on the battle- field meant the fiddle wasn’t completed until many years later, eventually ending up in Sweeney’s hands. Thus the carefully selected
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