THE CRANE WIFE

I enjoy most of this album immensely. The opener "Crane Wife" matches it's longer counterpart later in the mix and both are fabulous pieces. The crown jewel of the release is next: The 3-part "The Island" which many have praised before so I will just put in that it is awesome! These 3 songs make the album worth the money without any other tracks mentioned. The next piece, "Yankee Bayonet" is a male/female interplay ballad of the civil war and is excellently done, very Steeleye Span-like. Most of the rest of this album is more straight forward folk-rock that doesn't interest me as much . Overall, if I judged this album just on it's parts, it would receive a solid 3 stars, but with the grand bits taken as greater-than-the-sum of their parts, this jacks the rating to a 4. I have not heard more than a few other songs by this band (mostly) on this site, but I plan to look deeper into their catalogue. The Hazards of Love looks promising... 4 stars