FolkBlog

Was fortunate enough to see Vancouver, BC’s The Clumsy Lovers at an outdoor concert Sunday evening. If you can’t enjoy The Clumsy Lovers, then you don’t have a pulse. They play an engaging blend of bluegrass/folk/rock/Celtic with great skill and efficiency. Both the fiddler and banjo player are of remarkable skill on their instruments.

The most amusing part of the concert was when Andrea, the fiddle player, decided to start tossing shakers made of soda and beer cans to the youngins in front. Pretty soon there was a horde of shaker-crazed youngins rushing the stage, which turned into an impromptu preteen mosh pit, or at least as close as one can get to a mosh pit where preteens and bluegrass are involved. (I say bluegrass, but I am fully aware that since they have a drummer, they are not bluegrass as the purists would have it.)

One of the cool things about this group is that they generally mix a wide variety of contemporary cover tunes in with the traditional and original tunes. This concert’s cover surprise was a version of Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” with a walking fiddle part. Excellent stuff. Most of the material was drawn from their most recent album, After the Flood, which is their first CD to get wide circulation, as it was recently picked up by Nettwerk (the same label that Sarah McLachlan is on). I saw it the other day at Best Buy, so I’m pleased that it’s getting out there.

I’ve also decided to start blogging new adds to the Online Folk Festival here on the Folk and More blog, so I’ll start with tonight’s batch of new adds.

New Adds

Steven Spence is a fiddler from the Shetland region of Scotland, and has a local reputation for fiddle excellence and the willingness to compose a tune for a special occasion. He’s compiled them on an album entitled, appropriately enough, Spencie’s Tunes. This CD is a really fine display of tuneful fiddling. If you dig danceable fiddle tunes, then check this out. I particularly like the wedding waltz tunes.

Eleanor McEvoy has gained more public notice from a song she wrote before her first album came out then for the outstanding work she has done since. Eleanor McEvoy wrote the song “Only a Woman’s Heart”, which inspired the A Woman’s Heart compilation, which spent a year in Ireland’s Top Ten in 1992 and is STILL the top selling album in Irish history. She has since put out five really strong albums, which don’t seem to have gained the same level of acclaim. Her most recent CD, Early Hours, was just released in the States today. Picked it up at lunch. Early Hours continues the trend started on her previous CD, Yola, towards a more jazz-influenced, less-produced sound. This album, however, has a little more stylistic range than Yola, including a fiddle tune (McEvoy is a classically trained violinist), a couple folk/rock tunes, a slow blues shuffle rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis Tennessee”, and a traditional tune sung in Gaelic, plus some more conventional piano based pop music. This is good stuff. Too bad it looks like visa problems will keep Eleanor from touring the States soon. Eleanor will be the featured artist on the Online Folk Festival next week.

The Clumsy Lovers, Live: it was the only one of their recent CDs that I didn’t have, and I was pleased to pick it up at the concert. High energy raging bluegrass Celtic stomp.

Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch, You Can’t Save Everybody is really fine acoustic music from a couple really fine singer/songwriters working together. I predict that this CD will end up on a lot of Americana critics’ top 10 lists at year’s ends. It features crisp songwriting and playing in sparse acoustic arrangements that let the songs breathe. Particularly fine are the gospel-influenced title track, and the social commentary of “Everybody’s Working For The Man Again” lamenting the takeover of small town America by corporate megagiants. The publicity material did not include a release date. It’s being co-released by Compass and Dead Reckoning Records, so it should be widely available.