 | | Reviews | | |  JOHN SPIERS AND JON BODEN
Bellow
Fellside FECD175
Inspired … sparky … passionate … stirring … and just damn jolly fantastic! Erudite analysis of the Spiers/Boden phenomenon figures elsewhere in the folk press, so here's a simple emotive response to this brilliant second album from the winners of 2003's BBC Folk Awards Horizon gong.
All the skill, dynamics, originality and sheer nerve exhibited in 2001's Through And Through are here, multiplied and consolidated. The songs, from the sinister waltziness of Copshawholme Fair to the magical Brown Adam, are a blend of brilliantly inventive arrangement and compelling storytelling. Jon's in-your-face vibrato-laden bellow, out of the Elmer P Bleaty* school of vocalisation, can be unnerving on first exposure but the sheer gutsiness of it soon scores and anyway, he knows exactly when to tone it down with an overlay of warm and melodic resonance demonstrated beautifully here on the sentimental but unschmaltzy Go And Leave Me.
Tunes emanate from the English dance side of life and go all over the place with pure inventiveness. Morris classics Princess Royal and Cuckoo's Nest are twinned, the former played straight, clean and cheerily ornamented, the latter plied with Eastern European flavour and delicious atonal asides. John Spiers' own tune, The Dawn Chorus, is as beautiful an evocation as you could wish for and Benji Kirkpatrick's guitar and bouzouki add extra pizazz to four tracks, especially on Jack Robinson/Argiers/Old Tom Of Oxford, another sprightly set of dance tunes.
Plenty of artists have plundered the traditional repertoire and added this or that element of modernity but John and Jon seem to have a state-of-the-art connection to the living spirit of the tradition. An unfaultable album.
*An affectionate moniker that will be clear to older readers, trad aficionados and keen anagrammists.
Mel McClellan - June 2003
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Folk & Acoustic
