Full credit to Bellowhead. After the occasional chaos of their first album, live gigging tightened them up a lot, and for their sophomore effort, they come up with a variety of material and arrangements that really play to their instrumental and vocal strengths. For the most part the music is still traditional, but in many ways you'd hardly know it, since stylistically it pretty much falls out of time, sometimes like a dark cabaret, sometimes like a New Orleans brass band lurching madly. Jon Boden's voice continues to progress, and it's quite commanding these days, especially on something like "Fakenham Fair" or the creepy "Widow's Curse." There's plenty of fire among the musicians, and although the arrangements can be quite complex, they gobble them up with glee, especially on something like "Cholera Camp," a Kipling poem by way of Peter Bellamy. They're a completely integrated band now, rather than Boden and the rest, nobody really stands out from the pack, and that's become one of their strengths. As before, there are a couple of sea shanties, both lustily performed, and much of the choice of material is off the beaten path, avoiding comparisons to well-known versions, and thus allowing them to put their stamp on it. As a folk big band, there's no one around even remotely like them, and that's a good thing -- they'd certainly be hard to emulate.
© Chris Nickson /TiVo