Wookalily
Album: All The Waiting While
Label: One-A-Chord
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.wookalily.com

The press handout describes Wookalily as "Belfast-based livewires" who have been "gigging relentlessly since releasing a well-received EP of their work in 2011", from the experience of which they've been building a committed fanbase. With All The Waiting While, the girls set out "to record a debut album with past and present members of the band to provide a snapshot of the life and times of Wookalily"; quite what this actually entails in terms of settlement of personnel isn't entirely clear, but the album's fanciful, cartoon-like artwork would seem to imply that the current lineup of Wookalily comprises songwriter/guitarist Adele Ingram, with Sharon Morgan on 5-string banjo, mandolin and guitar, Louise Potter on drums and percussion and Lyndsay Crothers on lead vocals. However, the instrumentation you hear on each track is invariably a touch fuller (sometimes, indeed, more considerably so), with various extra contributions from Colin Henry (dobro), Bronagh McClean or Suzanne Savage (fiddle), Rohan Armstrong (double bass), producer Michael Mormecha (guitar) and a number of backing vocalists including Nina Armstrong and Rowena Cairns. The enclosed booklet helpfully gives the full personnel complement for each individual track, but I can't divine which of the listed musicians may have been past band members.

Wookalily's basic musical idiom is predominantly bluegrass-inspired, but the tenor and aura of Adele's compositions veers distinctly more towards country and even the more bluegrassy adventures involve some curious shifts in time-signature and structural quirks along the way that can rather disorient the unwary listener (the opening number Hands Pass In Time is a case in point). The girls move easily from the carefree honky-tonk of Got Me On My Knee to the gently swinging, slightly mournful Diamonds Or Gold (a standout) via the helter-skelter Cossack dash of Johnny Kicked The Bucket and the companionable back-porch old-time of Fire Below (the only song on the disc penned not by Adele but by Tom Watson); not quite everything convinces equally, but there's still a useful unity to the album that somehow transcends the sometimes ragbag nature of the roll-call of participants. Note also that Lyndsay only appears on seven out of the dozen cuts; she's got quite a powerhouse voice for the bluegrass idiom, almost a holler at times, with a soaring upper range and a gritty mid-register that proves useful on the occasional more belt-out-style numbers like Black Magic Doll and the kooky Banjo Blues. It might reasonably be assumed that guest lead-vocalists Elaine McConaghie, Catherine Grehan and Rowena Cairns are former band members (and then again, maybe not) - but they sound good nevertheless. Even so, maybe my favourite lead vocal on the whole album is Adele's on Diamonds Or Gold.

Summing up - there's a lot of promise here, and it does seem that Wookalily are working towards a sound of their own, but they've probably further to go than they quite realise if they're to escape from the snapshot frame created by their apparent reliance on other musicians, whether hailing from their past incarnations or not. But when they're at their most inventive, these self-styled livewires sure generate some electricity thru their high-energy performances!

And by the way, the package also incorporates a rather cryptic Scan Code for accessing a useful bonus track, Wookalily's cover of Dixie Hall's To A Dove - but this process has, I fear, thus far defeated me !…

David Kidman