Bristol, England's
Spiro proves that there are all sorts of ways to use traditional folk songs, that the songs themselves can be used as vibrant and ghostly players in a different scheme, the old melodies serving as launching pads and road markers in a different pattern. A quartet whose instrumentation (violin, mandolin, accordion, guitar, viola, cello) and song choices may suggest a 21st century version of
Fairport Convention or
Pentangle,
Spiro instead takes a minimalist classical chamber quartet approach to old northern British folk songs that really comes closer to something
Philip Glass might do, with abrupt turns and offshoots to the melody careening things in myriad directions, with the song itself re-emerging into things here and there like a submerged object floating back to the surface of a lake in the wake of a rainstorm. It's a fascinating approach, and here on the group's fourth album (the first album, Lost in Fishponds, was issued under the band name the Famous Five in 1994), and second for
Peter Gabriel's Real World Records,
Spiro has refined and expanded it to a fine edge. The group relies a little less on straight traditional material this time around (there are five traditional songs among the 14 tracks here, although what's traditional and what isn't is sometimes hard to tell from the titles alone), and bases things on lines from Emily Dickinson ("Yellow Noise") or Shakespeare's King Lear ("Spit Fire Spout Rain"), for instance, although there's always the feel of something old/something new woven into
Spiro's arrangements. This is a wonderful album from a completely unique band, who manage somehow to be both folk and something else again. ~ Steve Leggett