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FOLK
Songs From the Flood Plain * * * * 1/2
Jon Boden
Navigator/Planet
An Tobar * * * * 1/2
Aidan O'Rourke
Navigator/Planet
THE young turks of British folk are blowing away any lingering cobwebs of conservatism. Eliza Carthy, Rachel Unthank, Martha Tilston and other female folkies have played their part in the revival, with groundbreaking recent albums. Now two of the scene's prime male movers and shakers have concurrently launched bold new CDs. Jon Boden, a former Carthy sideman and co-founder of the popular band Bellowhead with duo partner John Spiers, has created an epic concept album in Songs From the Flood Plain. His solo tour de force is the counterpart of 70s masterworks such as Peter Bellamy's The Transports, Mr Fox's The Gypsy and Fairport Convention's Babbacombe Lee. Based on a post-apocalyptic rural scenario of his imagination, Boden's set might be self-penned but it draws heavily on the English folk tradition, with nods to rock. Replete with bleak and graphic poetic imagery, delivered deadpan on a spare instrumental bed recorded by the artist on an impressive range of instruments, the album has the cinematic punch of a sci-fi classic. Boden's Orwellian characters are introduced in the opening verse: reaper, beggar, doctor, lawyer, preacher. Later, alluding to a world deprived of fossil fuel and rife with anarchy, he waxes about "the sweet perfume of petrol" and "the metallic scent of rich decay". As he sings in the anthemic, concertina-backed centrepiece Dancing In The Factory: "We shovel dust and hide our hope and wrap ourselves in dreaming." An Tobar,
an equally adventurous work, driven by Aidan O'Rourke, the fiddle whiz in the trio Lau, is a concept album too but one closer aligned to Mike Oldfield's Hergest Ridge than any of the aforementioned 70s odysseys. Inspired by the Isle of Mull off Scotland's rugged west coast, the music simultaneously celebrates the spirit of the late local musician Martyn Bennett, who helped drag Scottish folk music into the 21st century. Taking a leaf out of Bennett's book, Tobar Nan Ealain combines Gaelic poetry reading with mouth music, samples and poignant violin. One For Martyn, one of four elongated instrumentals, builds like a Philip Glass composition. Sea daringly segues from folk to jazz free form,...