Thanks to Folk London and Gavin Atkin for a lovely review of our new album, The Brickfields, in the October/November edition of Folk London Magazine. You can get hold of the magazine here (digital and print). See below for the review (transcription below image).
Along with our mugs on the cover, the magazine also features our interview with Sarah Lloyd where we talked about the new album, our lockdown experiences, and lots of other stuff! It’s a great magazine with some interesting features, interviews, and reviews. Thanks so much to Gavin, Sarah, and Folk London!
Transcription:
Granny’s Attic
The Brickfields
Grimdon Records GRICD005
Most of us probably think of Granny’s Attic as primarily a concert band performing songs and tunes, but they originally focused on tunes and here they have decided to return to their old stomping ground.
For three committed and hard-working young professional musicians, carrying their instruments into a studio and making The Brickfields, a live album, must have been a joy after months with few or no gigs and practices.
Most of us work best alongside our colleagues and, as anglo concertina and melodeon player Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne says, Granny’s Attic’s members initially found the restrictions made it difficult to work creatively.
But somehow, with the help of technology, they found a way to arrange and write new tunes.
In the studio, it seems The Brickfields came together in just three days, in what sounds like a burst of exuberance and intensity. As well it might!
This is lovely, crisply played music, and all the instruments sound fabulous, which is of course a credit to both Granny’s Attic and to Ian Stephenson, who recorded them and shares mixing credits with the band.
The music is quite lightly processed, which adds to the live feel. The quiet passages really are quiet, and contrast powerfully with the loud sections where all three pull out the stops.
The nine tracks add up to 35 or so minutes of 14 tunes. Six are drawn from old tunebooks and a couple from the wonderful online Village Music Project, which publishes collections of tubes in abc format.
The others are from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website, Matt Seattle’s edited and republished edition of the 1770s Vickers tunebook, The Great Northern Tunebook, and John Offord’s Bonny Cumberland collection from the Lake District.
Eight of the tunes are self-penned. These are creditable pieces of work that in general sound much older than they are. Taken overall, The Brickfields stands as a kind of tribute to the old tunebooks, from these three young men from the 21st century.
I particularly liked fiddler Lewis Wood’s fine Highfield’s Lament, and also two of guitarist George Sansome’s tunes: the nicely angular Considerate Birders and the ingenious and deliciously 18th-century-sounding Queen’s Wood.
Gavin Atkin