Bellowhead - At the Circus of Tradition

How long has it been since the waters were last stirred in the field of Celtic folk? Not counting the false alarms and the very "border-crossing" hybridizations, the last names to break out of the enthusiasts' circuit were Eliza Carthy and Afro Celt Sound System: and that was nearly ten years ago.

So it is news when “Burlesque”, the debut album by England's Bellowhead, is hailed by the international music press as the most significant English traditional music record since “Liege and Lief” (Songlines).

It's a revolution quite different from that of Fairport Convention. If nothing else, because there's no trace of rock in Bellowhead's music. What you find instead is Balkan and gypsy music, the fiery drive of swing-era big bands, even a few rhythmic touches straight out of the disco era. Blowzabella and Brass Monkey had already experimented with rich, atypical arrangements in Anglo-Saxon folk some twenty years earlier, but the theatricality and sheer energy of Bellowhead are something entirely new.

This is, moreover, a revolution from within: the group's eleven (eleven!) members are all seasoned musicians from the traditional folk scene. The two masterminds, John Spiers and Jon Boden, already have a fair number of albums released as a duo behind them, while guitarist/mandolin player Benji Kirkpatrick is the son of John Kirkpatrick, the legendary accordionist of Steeleye Span, Albion Band and Brass Monkey.

Finally, Bellowhead's is also a less revolutionary revolution. Four years on from their debut EP, the only act that sounds like Bellowhead is still Bellowhead. There has been no wave of followers or imitators - and perhaps there never will be.

E.P. Omonymous came out in 2004, just a few months after the band was formed. From the opening "Rambling Saylor" it's clear the approach is something unheard of: the simple, age-old melody of the English traditional is wrapped in ascending coils of strings, caught in the crossfire of a horn call-and-response that twists and weaves tighter than even the Tower Of Power could manage. On "Copshawholme Fair" singer Jon Boden takes on the guise of a traveling showman, and the music takes on a melancholy, gypsy-like gait: accordion, bass drum and minor-key haze forge an interpretation utterly removed from the medieval-tinged enchantment Steeleye Span conjured back in 1970.

On the two instrumental tracks the formula starts to show its age a little, lapsing into longueurs and excessively linear upbeat rhythms, but the all-out blasts of the sunny "Prickle-Eye Bush" close the Ep in glory, in what sounds like a warning: keep your eyes wide open, you're going to see some things.

The things arrive two years later, with the Lp Burlesque. The cover depicts a dancer masked as a jester, a dove in hand at the centre of a ring of flames. The tones have grown even more circus-like, as the incendiary "Rigs of the Time" and "Jordan" immediately set out to prove.

Honesty is out of fashion, these are the clothes of the age. It opens with the horn-driven whirlwind of "Rigs of the Time", a polemical anthem about the scams and subterfuges of tradesmen (indeed, rig means both "garb" and "swindle"). Over a relentless 5/4 à la Dave Brubeck, the song runs through the petty thefts and feeble excuses of the baker and the butcher, the tailor and the milkman, before arriving at its final resolve:

The best plan I can think of

Is to take them all out, in a raging gale

When they stand up the cloud will explode

And the first to fall will be the biggest and oldest of these rogues

The storm seems to animate "Jordan" too. Defiant, yet quivering with unease, the voices of Boden and cellist Rachael McShane twist the placid major-key melody of the traditional version, tinting it with dark harmonies, lashing brass counterpoints and string ostinatos.

Then come aching, age-old ballads, with seemingly a cappella passages cloaked in acoustic filigree; and explosive numbers like "Fire Marengo", practically funky. The instrumentals come off better this time. Some of them lapse, at first, into an irritating fairground gait, but they wriggle free of it with a kaleidoscope of ideas, interweavings and timbres that refuses to become predictable.

The press hails it as a miracle, but a few rhythmic rough edges, especially in the handling of the basslines, leave hope that the band can still do even better.

With Matachin, Bellowhead move past their breaking-in period and partly rework the formula: less showmanship, more elegance. The maturity they've reached is reflected above all in the album's structure – every song is echoed by a brief vignette that shows it from another angle. "Fakenham Fair" opens and closes the record, first in a dreamy chamber-music guise, then merely recalled by the tinkling of a music box.

The album blends reggae syncopations and horn-driven fugues ("Kaafozalum/The Priest's Miss"), dances and nursery rhymes, work songs and pre-jazz choruses ("Cholera Camp", by Rudyard Kipling). The mood is jester-like, and the few more thoughtful moments are lightened by sparkling rhythmic touches, never rowdy.

Absolute highlights, besides the already-mentioned "Fakenham Fair", are the brass-band "Spectre Review" (a different arrangement for each verse) and the instrumental "Trip to Bucharest/The Flight of the Folk Mutants", with strings and horns coiling around each other to create an almost cinematic tension.

The record falls just a little short of being a masterpiece: perhaps it's missing just a touch of that pyrotechnic cheekiness that was both the blessing and the curse of its predecessor.

What should we hope for in the future? That the band finds a way to reconcile all of its souls: innovative and traditional, refined and circus-like, tragic and sly.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google