FOLKLAW - We Will Rise
Fiddle Of 8 Records FO8R02CD
This album starts with an uncompromising throwing down of the gauntlet that lifts the spirit enough to bring Chartists up from a thousand graves. Driving, insistent, foot-tapping folk rock that takes no prisoners. And on this, Folklaw’s third album, we are to encounter this sense of commitment on several occasions: music that has thrilled many festival audiences with its sheer sense of love of life. But it is not all up-tempo magic: there is a nice sense of chiaroscuro pervading the whole thing.
Indeed, for all the fine up-tempo songs of Nick Gibbs and Bryn Williams, it was the mellow reflective One Day At A Time, written by band member Martin Vogwell, that sealed the deal for me and brought the record to a fitting close. It just pipped Nick’s Crazy For The Girl as song of the album. This latter song will appeal to you if you are a bloke who had a beautiful girl of your age miraculously move in next door on holiday: as happened to me once many moons ago. And then this song will bring it all deliciously back, like the biting into Proust’s madeleine cake.
The seven-strong band is augmented here by producer Lyndon Webb on mandolin and guitars, and the addition of Belshazzar's Feast's Paul Hutchinson on his splendid accordion. I can imagine that this CD will sell well at their festival gigs this summer. They remain essentially a live music band, but are very far from mugs in the recording studio.
www.folklaw.co.uk
Dai Woosnam
This review appeared in Issue 129 of The Living Tradition magazine