Stephanie Hladowski & C. Joynes
Album: The Wild Wild Berry
Label: Bo' Weavil
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.myspace.com/stephaniehladowski

An album-full of sparse, unadorned, unflashy, mainly guitar-and-vocal treatments of eleven traditional songs may seem an unenticing prospect, both for the adventurous listener and the strict traditionalist alike, but that unpromising description hides a gripping, highly unusual, and intensely refreshing, musical and cultural experience. Singer Stephanie is based in Bradford (though curiously, I've never seen her at the city's Topic Folk Club even tho' I've been a member for over 15 years!), and released a marvellous EP three years ago on the Singing Knives label; she has a remarkable, very traditional but also slightly scary, singing style.

Her guitarist partner on this new disc, the mysterious C. Joynes, appears to hail from Cambridge, but beyond that I know nothing; his style is strangely resonant, unornamented, highly-strung and actually pretty original too - not at all yer standard strummy or finger-picked-by-numbers accompanimentalism but distinctly unorthodox and weirdly primitive - and peculiarly, perfectly suited to these archaic texts. Together they stoke up a very distinctive vision of some of the most time-worn of source material, from Dark-Eyed Sailor, Higher Germanie, George Collins and The Bitter Withy through to The Pretty Ploughboy, not to mention the disc's hoary title number.

Stephanie's considered a-cappella rendition of Flash Company is both ruminative and sensitive, as opposed to the almost flippant, or else over-jauntily defiant, readings we usually encounter from current revivalists. Elsewhere, the eerie dead ringing tonalities that punctuate the lines of George Collins, or the ancient resonances that surround Dark-Eyed Sailor's unusual stepped rhythm and characterise the plight of Died For Love's protagonist - all provide evidence of a thoughtful understanding and an uncanny sympathy between singer and instrumentalist, a quality that's all too rare nowadays in this age of instant wow-factor gratification and finicky virtuosity. The virtuosity we encounter on this disc is of an altogether different kind, and more welcome for it.

And ingenuity too - with some very ISB-like strangeness in the use of a minimalist drone on a bowed-banjo (not a bowed-gimbri!) on Lord Bateman and I think also on Bitter Withy. And the brief instrumental track titled Greensleeves is, hmm, like Anji had timeslipped back into the medieval age. This is a truly mesmerising disc, that deserves wider currency than its severely-limited-edition status.

David Kidman