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It’s folk, Jim, but not as we know it

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Posted by Chris on Dec 1, 2010 in Main, Music | 0 comments

Belshazzar’s Feast (2010)
Find the Lady

Let me attempt a crude summary of Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. The short story purports to be a review of a 20th century author’s rewriting of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Although the rewriting is word-for-word identical to the original, the reviewer claims that it’s much more relevant, much richer in meaning, than the 1602 version. The words might superficially appear the same, but the audience has changed what the words mean.

Listening to the first track on Find The Lady, “Wild Rover”, I was seized by an impossible contradiction. The song sounded exactly like my uneducated ears imagine it to have sounded in the early 1900s, note for note, and yet it sounds impossibly of the year 2010. I wish I could say that all the songs played to the same Borgesian effect, but Belshazzar’s Feast have updated many of the the folk standards on the album by means of humour, jazz, pop and classical elements, and a very British music hall sensibility.

To give you a taste of their attitude, “Lull Me Beyond Thee” is billed as ‘Published in the first edition of The Dancing Master (or Mafter af it waf writ in the 17 Century), which waf firft fold in Faint Paulf Cathedral by John. He.. waf fuppofed to be felling copief of the Big Iffue. Honeft!”

Sophomoric, perhaps, but coupled with some very accomplished musicianship, the album is both musically beautiful and stylistically relevant, as well as being quirky. It’s folk, Jim, but not as we know it. But be warned – it’s still folk.

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