SHIDE & ACORN

On display here is charming folk which certainly might appeal to lovers of the genre. Put it this way: If you adore Trader Horne and the idea of a more stripped down, demo-quality sound to the male/female sound on display there appeals to you, look no further.

Shide & Acorn's sound is intimate. That intimate sound is sometimes sad and sometimes playful. Interestingly, things are also fleshed out a bit in that Joy Perkis adds violin and recorder to the proceedings. Vocally, she has a beautifully light, soft voice. It perhaps doesn't exhibit a whole lot of character, but she sings in key and doesn't get in the way of anything. Some tracks also feature drums, so there is some variance to the overall approach.

I'm giving this one 3 stars. I'd like to hear their album proper and perhaps hearing these earlier tracks would make more of an impact. Here they don't have a sound distinctive enough to pull me in to the point where albums by Tudor Lodge, Mellow Candle, Dando Shaft and so forth would ever see diminished playing time as a result of my reaching for this CD.

Not to say this is a bad album; in fact, as mellow contemporary folk with very mild acid tendencies this is fairly decent music. The short opening blues instrumental is misleading as none of the rest of the album sounds anything like it, but given the loose fusion of sounds coming out of the folk resurgence at the time and the lack of rigid adherence to defined genre stereotypes I suppose it is not all that out of place here.

Most of the rest of the album consists of a combination of mildly-rock tinged traditional- sounding British tunes and ISB-inspired acid folk. The former is well-represented in songs like the airy "Eleanor's Song", "Away, Fly Away Love", "Solitaire" and the title track. The latter influence comes across on the electric and spacey "Trucking" with its layered strings and vocals dripping with the pungent odors of patchouli and pot, along with "So Long Day" which plods along with acoustic harmonics and male/female vocal tracks that sound as if they were lifted directly from a Licorice McKechnie/Robin Williamson duet.

The most memorable tune, relatively speaking, is the flute and piano-dominated "Marigold" with its slightly off-kilter tempo and acid-tinged mellow electric guitar soloing. The song doesn't stand up well over time, but would have been quite appropriately placed when it was recorded in folk-drenched Britain around the beginning of the seventies.

In all this is a pleasant album, but one that adds nothing to the progression of folk music of its day. I'd place it at just inside of three out of five stars, with a mild recommendation for serious students of progressive and acid folk.

peace