Pennyless
Album: Hanging Moon
Label: Rowdy Farrago
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.pennyless-music.co.uk

"Hanging Moon" is a good example of what I call fairytale folk and like a lot of fairytales, that equates to it being quite dark with lots of hidden meanings, veiled threats and trickery. Three is a powerful number when it comes to superstition and the same can be said when it comes to the size of a band, particularly when all three, Penny Stevens, Les Woods and Graham Dale with the former sharing the bulk of the vocal duties.

The songs and instrumental pieces are all penned from in the band and have an organic feel to them, one of the things I feel listening to the album is a wonderful sense that sits between a timeless drifting and the songs having their own sense of a time and place, something that they belong to, but defy you to say what.

There is also that sense of other worldly, drawing on folklore, with a bias towards the Lincolnshire flatlands and fens, from where the trio hail. The songs are rich in stories and images. One of the great things about lore is that whilst there are nasty things out there ready to take advantage of the unwary in many cases the counter is normally quite simple, a magical equivalent of if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, so beware! "The Witch And The Chimney Sweep" being a good example.

With the exception of songs with modern reference points most of the songs on this album would probably pass the collected test, by which I mean that if a gig someone said that this song was found in the collection of the Nathaniel Whitmore, Dean of Boston who recorded the music of the fens at the end of the 19th century, it would at least sound plausible.

Piracy gets a mention in the wonderful shanty based "Motley Crew" as does the ubiquitous fox in the harp lead piece "Footsteps Of Rerynardine" and you'll recognise a few of the other characters, if not by these names. The result is that "Hanging Moon" is an album that it's easy to relate to and one that allows you to slip away from the mundane, never a bad thing.

Neil King