Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem
Album: Violets Are Blue
Label: Signature Sounds
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.raniarbo.com

After an early career in bluegrass, New England-based singer and fiddler Rani founded the band Daisy Mayhem with her long-term collaborator bassist/banjo player Andrew Kinsey back in 2000, with the aim of broadening the acoustic palette from the basic template by utilising more unorthodox instrumentation such as cello and a battery of unusual percussion in addition to the standard bluegrass sounds. The Daisy Mayhem quartet lineup was (and is still) completed by Rani's percussionist husband Scott Kessel and guitarist Anand Nayak.

The band's four records to date have knowingly but unassumingly explored an eclectic mix of Americana stylings, from bluegrass, western swing and cajun to boogie, blues and old-time, sometimes extending these modes to enterprising treatments of traditional material. Ringing the changes, there's no traditional material on Violets Are Blue, which presents a set of "love songs from the kaleidoscopic perspective of midlife … hopeful, truth-telling and wry". Six of the album's dozen songs were penned by Rani herself, and they're all winners, pick of them probably being Piece Of Land and the album closer Sweet And The Bitter, the latter sporting a delicate string trio arrangement. Anand contributes one song of his own, If I'm One, and the remainder are covers. Of these, I'd single out James Hill's You Should See Me Now, a beautiful song with a loosely traditional feel and a lovely gentle arrangement. Danny Schmidt's Swing Me Down swings along nicely with a genial cajun feel (and there's Dirk Powell guesting on accordion), while Fred Rose's I'm Satisfied With You kinda takes us back to the swing era, with a typically stylish coquettish vocal from Rani. May Erlewine Bernard, provides a guest backing vocal for two tracks, one of which - her own composition I Love This City - is more akin to soulful pop; this, like Rani's own song Walk Around The Wheel, benefits from a fluid and equally soulful fiddle solo from Rani.

Throughout, the standard of musicianship is very high and the arrangements are superbly intuitive and always interesting, with some imaginative touches. Although the disc's musical stew is still just as tasty as on previous albums, it's perhaps more in the vein of rootsy s/s than any of the above specific sub-genres. The track that's most akin to bluegrass, albeit of the contemporary variety, is Down By The Water, which breezes along with a dash of electricity offsetting the light acoustic textures. Which leads me to remark that, while the choice of lead vocalist for each individual song is very apt (though they're not individually identified on the credits, unfortunately), that feature's not ideally conducive to one's perception of the disc as a unified album (that's not to say it doesn't hang together though, I hasten to add). But it still satisfies very much, and to my mind is wholly consistent in an artistic sense with the standard set by the band's previous releases.

David Kidman