Tinderbox
Album: Live! At The Cottage
Label: Wet Feet
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.tinderboxacoustic.com

I've been fortunate enough to see Tinderbox perform live many times over the years. Dan and Monique are Bournemouth/Poole based and for many years regular performers on the local scene. It gave me the privilege of watching the band work up new material for their studio albums and together with Bob Burke, effectively the third member of the duo, continue to work and experiment with the songs after release.

So far the band have record four studio albums, stretching back to "The Fire Inside" in 2007, with "Counting Time" being the most recent in 2012. With Dan and Monique now being parents, the number of gigs reduced and when they did play it tended to coincide with me being away, bad luck and poor planning.

Having "Live At The Cottage" drop through the letterbox has proved to be such a blessing on a number of accounts, first and foremost because it gives a great opportunity to reconnect with the band's earlier material, which brought a whole host of good memories flooding back, but also because it's a good pointer to where they are going.

By far the majority of the tracks on the album refer back to previous releases, but all of the songs feel like they have been lifted and brought into the more Americana direction the band have been taking and with the album being live, having a more organic feel.

The whole point of a live album is to make you feel like you were there, to bring you into the experience and that is definitely the case hear with banter linking the songs on the album, it has a distinct warmth that helps capture the personality of the band.

More importantly, and, for me a real treat as it does have that feeling of being on the brink of something new that the old gigs had, there are a trio of new songs on the album, which I'm told have already been earmarked for the bands next studio album, which gives "Live A Dove Cottage" is an album that is very much part of the journey.

Monique has one of those voices that you could listen to for ages and because of the way Tinderbox write songs, it has so much good narrative to work with. These are songs with point and purpose delivered in a style that pulls on folk traditions that have ping ponged back and forwards across the Atlantic.

"Live At The Cottage" lays down the marker that Tinderbox are back, that there is a decent canon of work for you to explore if this is your first encounter with them and if it is, it's a good one and that the creative spark is definitely still there with more material to come.

Neil King