The Bad Shepherds
Album: Mud, Blood And Beer
Label: Monsoon
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.thebadshepherds.com

On first glance I thought the album was a tribute to a Death Eaters' dark weekend revel, but then I realised that I'd missed out a comma and the title was actually "Mud, Blood & Beer", although thinking about it that might not be too far from the truth either.

As with any Bad Shepherd's album, the first play of the album is blind with the family scoring points for guessing the song before the lyrics kick in, with a bonus point for correctly declaring a song to be original. It might be a little sad, but it's still one of the few games at which my wife and I can still beat the kids as most of the songs were originally released before they were born. Still take it where you can get it.

The folkisation of songs from other genres, is not new, heck, "Mud, Blood & Beer" is Bad Shepherd's third go at it, but also check out the likes of The Poozies "Love On A Farm Boy's Wages" and Emily Slade's version of "I Don't Like Mondays", but when done well, it definitely works and most of the time it works here, with the possible exception of "The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum."

The reason that it works is that these are comedy versions of the songs, but a reimaging of the songs. I think if it was the former, the joke would fall flat very quickly, it's because you can feel, particularly Ade Edmondson's affiliation with the originals that it does work.

Edmondson is joined by the other Bad Shepherd regular's members Andy Dinan and Troy Donockley for the album and their approach keeps a sparseness to the music, which focuses the attention to both lyric and where appropriate in the mix, whistle.

The album signs off with two compositions from within the band, the title track and "Off To The Beer Tent", you might detect a theme. As with its predecessors I found "Mud, Blood & Beer" easy to engage with, which I will admit is partly related to my familiarity with the songs and their role in my musical development. What I find pleasing is that there is some reverse osmosis going on with my son. I discovered folk through the likes and The Clash and XTC, my youngest has discovered The Stranglers through folk.

Neil King