Carthy Hardy Farrell Young
Album: Laylam
Label: HemHem
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.eliza-carthy.com/laylam.cfm

Girl power roolz - ok?… Four female folk fiddle-singers of proven talent - Eliza Carthy, Bella Hardy, Lucy Farrell and Kate Young - teamed up on the brilliant suggestion of Kathryn Tickell, who said she thought they would sound good together. And whoa, they sure do…Indeed, for all that it seems to've been thrown together almost on a whim, Laylam is as satisfyingly a feelgood experience for the listener as it evidently was for the participants.

The seemingly simple and obvious gambit was to assemble a generous handful of their favourite songs (of whatever genre) and then just going for it in the studio, creating fresh arrangements and harmonies around their responses to those songs. It's pretty much an equal-handed collection, with each of the four singers (sort-of) claiming responsibility for introducing three songs to the collective repertoire. The invigorating vibe and gusto they bring to their treatments is irresistible and utterly contagious, and they display an impressive degree of stylistic versatility, tackling anything from traditional folk (Little Birds, from a Cecil Sharp American collection, and Myrtle Tree, a Flash Company variant, persuasively voiced here by Lucy) and old-time (Dewdrop) to contemporary Americana (Buddy & Julie Miller's Wide River), with a couple of entirely believable oddball diversions in the form of brilliant fun forays into Kansas Joe McCoy's 30s classic Why Don't You Do Right and Patsy Cline's iconic Walking After Midnight (Bella excelling here!).

The set kicks off in vigorous kick-stomp mode with the enthusiastic multi-fiddle old-timery of Greasy Coat, and the playful mood continues on through a syncopation-rich take on the well-loved Chickens In The Garden (long associated with the Watersons, of course). But good though the first half of the disc is, the best seems to've been saved for the second half, with Eliza's own composition June Is The Coldest Month Of The Year, decked out in desperately chilling string texturings, followed by Bella's convincingly wistful rendition of Cyril Tawney's Sally Free And Easy and then in complete contrast a decidedly strange but intriguing, highly animated tralallero-inflected reworking of the forebitter A Hundred Years Ago from Kate, and as finale possibly the finest moment of all, the hymn Better Home (a heartfelt tribute to Helen Schneyer), on which Eliza leads the assembled a cappella foursome with real feeling. More than any other track, this one perhaps most stimulatingly typifies the concept of the album title, a word that's long been debated among folk aficionados and which Eliza explains as simply meaning "chorus" and "a good reason to sing together in any setting". And Amen to that, I say!

David Kidman