Pick Yer Feet Up
Album: Acoustic Dance Music From Appalachia To Zanzibar
Label: Moth House
Tracks: 8
Website: https://www.mothhouserecording.com

Pick Yer Feet Up are Eleanor Donne (on fiddle) and Dave Murray (on "twangs and bangs"); their repertoire is ostensibly as exhaustive as the subtitle of this disc, consisting of a wonderfully diverse mix of dance tunes from a bunch of different times and places (although to claim Zanzibar as a source is probably a mite fanciful!).

This takes in a Bavarian drinking-song in 10/8 oompah-time; assorted Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek and klezmer tunes, some with even more bewildering time-signatures; a Texas fiddle-tune played as ragtime; and, to close, a brief runthrough of an Irish tune from the celebrated collection of erstwhile Chicago police chief O'Neill. For me, the disc proved such fun that I could happily have done with at least twice the amount of music that Eleanor and Dave deliver in this heady 19-minute whistle-stop (or should I say fiddle-stop?!) world-tour.

But having said that, there are bound to be moments when a listener yearns for a break in the unrelieved use of fiddle for the melody-line, to hear a different lead voice so to speak - and this, despite the fortuitous use of multitracking of accompanying textures, where the end result can nonetheless still sound a touch thin. The overall effect is a bit akin to walking in on an impromptu practice session of Banoffi (Dave Moss's band) a few years back, not least in that the enthusiasm of the thoroughly genial, homespun scratch-band vibe overrides any charge of insubstantiality.

David Kidman