 | | Reviews | | |  BOB FOX
Borrowed Moments
TSCD544
Fate decreed 2003 to be Eliza Carthy's year at the BBC Folk Awards, but given different timing surely fellow Singer Of The Year nominee Bob Fox would have grabbed the gong. Somehow this talented north-easterner has escaped major acclaim over the years but his excellent 2000 album Dreams Never Leave You followed by last year's stunning debut from The Hush have, at long last, boosted his profile.
This return to acoustic form puts Fox's gorgeous blackberries-and-cream voice in a setting of Class A songs - four traditional, seven contemporary - which mine the peaks and troughs of the human condition and emerge sparkling with Fox's sensitive vocal interpretations and adroit tune adaptations. Superbly supported by Neil Harland (double bass), Norman Holmes (whistles and flutes), Chuck Fleming (viola) and annA rydeR (idiosyncratic capitalization, BVs, piano accordion, muted trumpet), this album exudes class. Fox's guitar work is subtle and inventive, particularly on Vin Garbutt's tragic She Waits And Weeps, while his eloquent piano playing interwoven with Harland's weeping bass lines makes a heart-wrenching epic of Jez Lowe's Last Of The Widows. Upbeat gets a look in too, with the saucy Whitby Tailor, Anth & Gerry Kaley's Child Of Mine and a warm, fresh rendering of that hoariest of Geordie ditties, Dance To Your Daddy.
Cherry-picking from a slew of strong cuts is no easy task - Ralph McTell's Peppers And Tomatoes and Chris Leslie's My Love Is In America compete with the Garbutt and Lowe pieces for honours - but currently hot from replays on my copy is the final track, the traditional Bonny At Morn: rydeR's eerie muted trumpets evoke a grainy, black-and-white world where immigrant jazz musicians back-play the age-old scene of a nursing mother musing on the hardships of life. Startling, moving stuff.
Mel McClellan - September 2003
See also:
The Hush: Dark To The Sky.
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Folk & Acoustic
