Alasca
Album: Actors & Liars
Label: King Forward
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.alascamusic.com

Alasca is a four-piece band based near Amsterdam; their debut album Actors & Liars received massive acclaim in its homeland on release there just over a year ago, and I can't quite see why it's taken so long to secure a UK release now! The sure-footed musical signature of the band references - but not derivatively - a host of folk-prog-indie musics, to the extent that the sounds they produce are at once reassuringly familiar and reassuringly original, and the band's songwriter Frank Bond clearly has a literate grasp of the idioms concerned and the dramatic possibilities they invite.

There's a kind of epic quality to the sound of the album generally, and yet the band's instrumental forces are modest - guitars, banjo, bass, keyboards and percussion - but well utilised with a musician's sense of light and shade and no overkill; any solos are economically and effectively pointed too. Frank's songs, despite their occasional obliqueness of expression, manage to be evocative in the most pleasing way, and there seems to be a surprise - rather than a jolt - around every corner. No track sounds like the next, and moods conjured range from a kind of Tull-inflected flauterie (Arms Of The Arts) to the tinkling mando-banjo textures that offset the harder drive of Never Cry Wolf, via the exaggerated swirling carnivalesque commentary of Politics, the tenderly beautiful, intimate acoustic-troubadour standout I Dreamed She Was The Universe and the distinctly Mumfordian demeanour of the singalong I Will Go, while the pastoral Traveler's Vesper even put me in mind of the more reflective side of Stackridge.

But for all the accessibility of Alasca's music, there's also a curious, and quite obstinate, quality of elusiveness that ensures successive plays of individual tracks reveal more subtlety, and this double-edged sword may serve to deny Alasca immediate wider acceptance.

David Kidman