Rating: 3/5
Review:
Fine performances marred by unsympathetic drums and production
There is a lot that's good about this album, but I have some pretty serious reservations about it.
10,000 Maniacs are an excellent band of musicians and this is quite an imaginative collection of fine traditional British folk songs. It's great to see Dark-Eyed Sailor here, for example; the only version I have is on the first Steeleye Span album - Hark! The Village Wait from 1970 - and I was really looking forward to hearing the one here. The same applied to a lot of these songs, but overall I wasn't all that keen.
The problem for me is really the drumming and the production mix. The instrumental work is often excellent and the vocals are great - Mary Ramsay is terrific, I think, and I like her singing on Dark Eyed Sailor as much as the lovely duet that Maddy Prior and Gay Woods made of it, which is really saying something. But...after a promising couple of opening tracks we get three in a row with truly unsympathetic drumming, mixed prominently forward and dominating the sound. It's basic rock backbeat pretty well throughout and while there's certainly a place for that in this music, to have it this prominently in a song like She Moved Through The Fair just seems wrong to me. An up-tempo version is an interesting idea - but surely not with a backbeat throughout which could have come from Rock Around The Clock? The whole atmosphere of many of the songs (including the otherwise excellent Dark-Eyed Sailor) is really spoiled for me by this.
This is a personal view and you may well disagree. Plenty of people like this style (it reminds me a little of mid-70s Steeleye Span from Parcel Of Rogues onward) but I'm afraid I was rather disappointed in this album. They are fine songs and a fine band but the drumming and production spoil this for me.
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