 | | Reviews | | |  BATTLEFIELD BAND
Out For The Night
Temple Records COMD2094
Here's a neat idea. Write some tunes and add some penned by others, sing several pretty good songs of your own with a mix of traditional material and play everything well. This can be astonishingly effective and sometimes totally ignored by 'this-year's-model' bands. It's now 30 years since the Batties spearheaded the Scottish music revival in much the same way that Planxty drop-kicked the Irish tradition into our collective consciousness but they still recognise the importance of giving their constituency exactly what it wants. This time around, their (gasp) 20th Temple label album - with founder member Alan Reid the only one remaining from 1974 - still fuses ancient and modern with a mix of studio and bonus live tracks to assured effect.
There has been no loss of momentum either. Their take on Celtic music for the mind and body continues to mark them out as innovators and their tag-line 'Forward With Scotland's Past' is an apposite one. As the album unfolds it reveals a host of gentle surprises - The Earl Of Errol with its nudge-nudge tabloid storyline, and Henry McCullough's older-but-no-wiser tale in Belfast To Boston, sung with a lambent plaintiveness by guitarist and cittern player Pat Kilbride. In fact the band has rarely sounded better, playing with an ease and sensitivity hard to equal. Yearning instrumentals - Reid's Rest And Be Thankful and the title track - demonstrate that the passage of time has done nothing to dim the Battlefield sparkle. In Mike Katz they surely have the subtlest piper to wrestle with both highland and small varieties and Alasdair White's fiddling belies the mere 18 years he's spent on the planet! This is an outfit that can include tunes titled Ms Dynamite Of Benbecula and Trouble At Baghdad Roundabout. Yippee!
Clive Pownceby - April 2004
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 "Out for the Night" marks 30 years of Battlefield Band, yet the music displayed is as new and fresh as ever. This remarkable band moves from strength to strength on each of the tracks, and the three bonus concert tracks help to demonstrate why Battlefield Band was voted "Best Live Act" in 2003. This CD is highly recommended, and better yet, if they appear in concert near you, be the first in line for tickets!
Scott McClellan, Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
Heard their new "Out for the Night" tunes at a concert in Dayton Ohio in April and this group never fails to amaze me. They change members and each person brings a fresh new ingredient to the band. I find the fantastic guitar playing of Pat Kilbride to be the biggest change to this present line-up.
Ron Oblander, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA | | | | | | |  |
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Folk & Acoustic
