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Steeleye Span - Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again CD (album) cover

TEN MAN MOP, OR MR. RESERVOIR BUTLER RIDES AGAIN

Steeleye Span

 

Prog Related

3.11 | 37 ratings

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Einsetumadur
Prog Reviewer
3 stars 9.5/15P.: Steeleye Span go 'retro' with a slightly uneven mix of acoustic folk ditties and dark electric folk meandering in the vein of The Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs"

Ten Man Mop is a fairly strange album, and probably the one which is the toughest listen in Steeleye Span's whole discography. Contrary to the more sophisticated and medieval Please to See The King album with the prominent British influences, this album is kind of a return to the Irish song lore that was hinted at on the debut album of the group in 1970.

Therefore, actually the whole album has a very biting and dark sound which always reminds me of how I imagine a storm in the foggy, cold autumn blowing through the brown and bare highlands. Typically, the term "autumn album" most frequently describes romantic and softer albums like Genesis' Wind and Wuthering or Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here; in this case you get to hear another kind of autumn, a much more uncomfortable one which nevertheless isn't short of impression. I'm a great fan of Martin Carthy and there's only few of his songs which I think to be boring. Sadly, his acoustic numbers here are. If you're used to his wonderful singing on the Albion Country Band's New St.George, his marching masterpiece Night of Trafalgar or the mindblowing Steeleye Span BBC version of The Bold Poachers, songs like Marrowbones are somehow sub-par.

The opener Gower Wassail, an old Welsh 3/4-measured tune about some Christmas punch, however is really powerful. It already starts off with that edgy, plucked electric guitar sound on this album: Carthy plays one droning quint power chord again and again with some crunchy overdrive and absolutely no hint of additional effects (!). A second, softer guitar now adds some chords while some spare tabors are the only drums to be featured here. Between the first two stanzas, sung strongly by Tim Hart with his typical nasal voice, a very fine a-capella section of the whole band (Carthy, Hart, Knight and Prior with her clear alto voice) can be heard singing the refrain of the piece. From 1:45 on the arrangement becomes more beautiful, plenty of jangling guitars, picked fiddles and dulcimers are woven together to a delicate sound carpet. A short bridge reduces the arrangement again to the Fender Mustang and Telecaster guitars (as the liner notes say) and the bass guitar. Martin Carthy's can play really forcefully on acoustic guitars, but when he switches to electric guitars the pieces sound even more 'merciless'. The lyrics go We hope that your apple trees prosper and bear. So that we may have cider when we call next year.; there are no footnotes of Asian literature, no recitation of satellites of planets, just very simple and authentic lyrics from the Welsh countryside: the 'prog' neither lies in the music nor in the lyrics here, but basically in the arrangement. The piece then ends just like it has begun with the dry bass guitar sounds and then ends fairly abruptly.

Steeleye Span listeners know the jigs and reels which the band is famous for, short, traditional instrumental dances that aren't missing on any of the early Steeleye records. Here, we even have two of these dances, and the first one are the Jigs, driven by Peter Knight's virtuoso violin in a jolting rhythm. Just like it is usual on this album only acoustic instruments appear: besides the violin, there are just a banjo and some acoustic guitars, played by Tim Hart and Martin Carthy. The Reels appear a bit more fast-paced and rapid, but apart from that don't differ much from the jigs; actually, there are two different jigs in Jigs and even three reels in Reels, but I think that Steeleye Span combined them all to one single piece because I cannot notice different parts here. Both pieces do not include any unpredictable passages, but - lasting just three minutes each - serve as good food-tappers after the more complicated pieces on the record. Maddy Prior also plays some mean spoons on this one, actually the only spoons I have ever heard on a rock album.

Four Nights Drunk is not very different, except for that an amusing text about a drunk man and his hallucinations is added here, this time sung by Martin Carthy. An interesting effect is that the whole piece only consists of the vocals and the fast, playful violin playing the same unisono. After two minutes and a dog's call, the piece becomes a jig as well which loosely variates the catchy melody of the song with a good bass line played on the acoustic guitar.

The solemn and reflective When I Was on Horseback then is more exciting for the prog fan: 6 minutes of mesmerizing dulcimers, psychedelic as hell without any keyboards or too many electric guitars, perhaps one of the definitive pieces which everyone here should have heard. The whole piece is based on a floating dulcimer line to which Maddy Prior now may contribute her beautiful singing: the first time on this record, actually. After a minute an additional clean electric guitar and Ashley Hutching's best electric bass on this LP join in, and as soon as the violin adds a soft counterpointed line, the basic structures of the song are already built up. Somewhere from the middle of the piece on Peter Knight delivers a smooth and rather long violin solo, especially the pizzicato section creates a surreal effect: absolutely beautiful, wishful, but still kind of sad. "Wasn't I pretty when I entered Cork city, and met with my downfall on the 14th of May." This actually says everything about the song and its mood. A crescendo leads to a reprise of the first stanza, but now sung by the whole band as a chorale. To get a feeling how this sounds listen to Venus in Furs by The Velvet Underground: that mix between psychedelic electricity and English folklore is present in both pieces.

Marrowbones is much in the vein of Four Nights Drunk: a simple, funny tale based on the Harm set, harm get saying, is another typical folk song: a lot of lyrics, not too variable music, but a pleasant listen nonetheless. Neither will anyone hate it, nor will anyone worship it; that's it. Still, it's worth a listen for the double vocals by Prior and Carthy which aren't bad.

Now let's move over to Captain Coulston, my favorite track on this record and the track which brings the raw and original feeling of this album to perfection. Again, there is the electric dulcimer playing a hypnotic melody, backed by tremolo-laden electric guitar chords and Martin Carthy's organ which has its rare appearance in the background here. While Maddy Prior recites an exciting story about a pirate ship's attack on a ship carrying people to America, the music gets more and more intense and disturbing: the spooky electric guitar becomes more and more prominent, timpanis roll through the view, then the violin and the fuzz bass nearly saw the song to pieces, always with the frantic slashing of the distorted dulcimer. Some will also notice some blues melodies in the lead vocal line (1:56) which, as they don't really fit into the piece, always grab my attention - fitting with the "pirate ship" which is coming along at that time. Again, the song ends with a happier jig after Captain Coulston has finally defeated the pirates -, now with the more optimistically sounding banjo instead of the swirling guitars.

Wee Weaver is the predecessor to The Weaver and the Factory Maid from Steeleye's Parcel of Rogues record: a piece just for the violin and vocals, although here Maddy Prior takes over the lead. As well, the wee weaver progresses much slower and fascinates the listener with the 'stretched' melody. All in all - from the prog point of view - one of the more interesting folk songs on the record, although the glorious multi-tracked vocals of Weaver and the Factory Maid are missing here.

The final piece, Skewball then ends the album in nearly a heavy-metal-manner: at first the song begins with racy finger picking on the banjo and Tim Hart and Maddy Prior supplying very strong vocals, this time about a horse race. After some stanzas dry and hard guitar riffs slash in, but again blend into the arrangement well instead of overflowing the song with overdone sound mush.

Some reissues add the a-capella-piece General Taylor, sung very well by the whole band with Tim Hart as the leader.

Ashley Hutchings left the band after this album; he always was a quiet bandleader who organised the music, but didn't appear as a soloist in the music, but at that time he had founded a new line-up, the Albion Country Band, a loose collective of musicians who came and went until now. Check out his collaboration with his later wife Shirley Collins, No Roses, featuring the best folk rock song *ever* (I only bestow that title on this one track), Murder of the Maria Marten.

All in all, Ten Man Mop is a very impressing album which is simple in structure, but much more sophisticated and strenuous in sound and arrangement; the medievalisms from Please to see The King are completely gone away, leaving behind one of the most straightforward folk albums of the group. This leads to a ranking of about 3 stars, an album with many average or decent pieces, but also with three outstanding documents of electric folk which actually cannot be a lot better. Still, this means 'good' and it is worth buying, but the complete album isn't a really essential buy.

Einsetumadur | 3/5 |

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