Acoustic+ - live in Frome

It has been a couple of months since the last Acoustic+, with the customary summer hiatus following the Frome Festival Food Feast. It returned to the Cheese and Grain yesterday evening with aplomb, despite the fact that the venue is part way through a comprehensive £500k re-configuring to bring it up to the standards required of a regional venue and one of the four acts being forced to cancel at the very last moment due to a temporarily voiceless vocalist! The good news is that at the eleventh hour a quality replacement was scrambled and The Black Feathers have now been rescheduled for Acoustic+ on 22 November.
The evening started with Frome-based duo Seasons.

Bertie Harrison-Broninski on Irish bouzouki and Fin Scholefield on guitar.

Their original songs were very interesting and far from wholly traditional - so their chosen bookmark as alt-folk is very much warranted - but the choice of cover versions was no less remarkable.

The bouzouki is an instrument that has expanded its territory vastly in the last century or so; it made its way to Greece from Asia Minor as late as the start of the 20th century, Celtic-influenced folk by the late 1960s and is now in common use in Scandinavia too.
I seems that I need to 'look sharp' when it comes to the act that stood in in place of The Black Feathers and not least because Sloe Jam is appearing on Frome FM this evening (from 9pm BST/UTC+1).

Francis Hayden on guitar.

Sloe Jam is no flash in the pan - that should be obvious - so here is what I thought about Sloe Jam in 2009 and you really do need the album.
The third act to play was Albatross Archive. Once a four-piece, latterly a three-piece, and as it happened yesterday (because their saxophone player was in San Francisco presenting a research paper on Post Modernism) just a duo for the very first time. It was astonishing and not least because most others would have given up long ago. Then there was a faulty lead and then Coleridge smiled (possibly and posthumously). 

Everything went well thereafter.

   
To close was the band Three Corners fronted at least to a great extent by the organisers of Acoustic+. That said, this was Three Corners in full band mode and I'm not actually sure that I managed to get everyone in a single picture.

This is as good as I got.

    

You could take a completely different perspective of course.

Bittersweet - and it gets under your skin.

It is arguably harder to review this album than most other things if for one reason only; it just so happens that Sloe Jam is a band from these parts - Somerset, UK and that defines it about as poorly as could be imagined - the cross-genre magnificence of the Glastonbury Festival defines music better than the Wurzels could ever hope to. It would be easy if I could say they were 'Scrumpy & Western' or just another pub-band but fortunately they are not.

For a start Next To The Skin consists only of original compositions and, while I have no issue with judicious covers, that is worthy of note and at eleven tracks (49 minutes) is it not short but certainly never overstays its welcome. The band is tight and the production as clean as it needs to be but still quite unforced.
When global warming means that the Somerset Levels again resemble a delta at least there is the soundtrack to go with it and a far bigger stage than this surely beckons....

Sloe Jam, live at the Frome Festival, on a damp 5 July 2008.

Stand-out tracks? That's hard to say, but possibly 'Believe In Magic', 'A Wanderer, She Said' and 'Open More Wine'.
Or try it this way instead and it is a very rash suggestion indeed: play an Eric Clapton album, each track interleaved with one from 'Next To The Skin', and just listen...
They are in no way the same but try and imagine what it might have sounded like if Clapton had a female co-vocalist and Pee Wee Ellis guesting on saxophone...
I did exactly that - using 'Unplugged' as the Clapton album - and now I really understand why they don't do covers. If you want to spoil yourself and also baffle your blues-rock loving friends then this album is mandatory and on two tracks Pee Wee Ellis really does play saxophone!

It is supposed to be summer... Virtual Festival 2

This is less virtual than the last post. It is the 5th July and - as part of the Frome Festival - there was an international food event in the town centre this afternoon and evening. The weather for today was not predicted to be good but it was actually fine if perhaps a bit windy until about 4pm, which is when it really started to matter.

Then it started to rain steadily, if not particularly hard, when it really mattered most and this may have dampened enthusiasm but nevertheless the turnout (and the food of course) was good.

Local blues-rock band 'Sloe Jam' tried, quite successfully in a rather difficult situation, to keep spirits up and unusually for such a band they do no cover versions at all.

Sloe Jam live at Frome Festival, 5th July 2008.