Battlefield Band
Album: Enough For All
Label: Temple
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.battlefieldband.co.uk

Here's another inspirational recording from the flagship Scottish band, which may well be counted as their finest hour in the studio. The musicians' command of their art is as impressive as ever, and no reviewer will be able to resist superlatives when commenting on the standard of playing, the intuitive interplay, the abundant flair for creativity in textural arrangement and use of dynamics. As the band takes us on another carefully-planned journey through their heritage we encounter so many felicitous details that in lesser hands a listener might find distracting but here add to the richness and stylishly embellish the expression of sentiments and musical ideas.

It was a stroke of genius to begin the new collection not with a stirring set of tunes but with guitarist Sean O'Donnell's magnificent setting of Louis MacNeice's Bagpipe Music, where he truly captures the wicked truths of its rhymes in counterpoint with its delicious and quite special musicality. This hard act to follow is almost capped by the ensuing set, which conjoins a pipe march, an animated puirt a beul and a jig composed by band member Ewen Henderson.

The Gaelic mouth music style recurs on Nic Coiseam, a song composed by the renowned bard Duncan ban MacIntyre, the haunting setting for which involves a fabulously rich twin-fiddle arrangement. On several other tracks too, the band's two fiddle players (Ewen and Alasdair White) weave a magical consort, and a spine-tingling moment is always assured when Mike Katz's signature bagpipes enter the fray; the further incorporation of percussion into the already-mighty Battlefield texture on the closing Tynes In Overtime set makes a spectacular disc finale. It's a credit to this long-established band that none of the disc's tune-sets can fail to catch fire when there's such keenness and inventiveness on display, and the air/schottische/polka set (track 7) is an especially rewarding gambit here, but it's probably inevitable that attention will be focused on the vocal selections, which once again eschew extensively-trodden repertoire and unearth some true gems.

Among these, honourable mention must go to Ewen's fine rendition of the sea-faring song Duanag an T-Seòladair, Aaron Kramer's political commentary In Contempt (from the lyric of which the album gains its title), and Andy Mitchell's Farewell To Indiana, which chronicles the return to Scotland of fulfilled emigrants - this latter song featuring some atmospheric harmonica playing from guest Mike Whellans. This is a well nigh faultless disc, and the concomitant is that faultless discs are all too often soulless - but emphatically not in this case.

David Kidman