This fourth A HAWK AND A HACKSAW album (fifth if you count the 2007 8 track EP with The Hun Hangár Ensemble) was recorded in Budapest in 2008. It is a culmination of the relationship that Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost have formed with Hungary and with the musicians they have lived and worked with on their visits. Apart from Barnes on accordion and drums and Trost on violin, viola and more besides, ten others musicians are credited. The resulting depth and richness of ensembles is one of the CD's many delights.
Accordion, cimbalom and violin are the dominant instrumental colours. Dance rhythms and traditional-sounding melodies comprise the main substance. The overall mood is a celebratory immersion in hard-won streams of ancient wisdom and confident, good humoured authority. It's a surprise to discover that only the opening and closing tracks are listed as "trad arr". Barnes (5) Trost (1) and the pair of them/trad (2) account for all the others.
Opening track "Fori Tu Argile" is the first of the traditional tunes, with nearly everyone joining in (by the sound of it) in a rollicking street party of dancing lilts. "Lassú" (meaning slow) ends things with a lament played on fiddles and bratch. On these and every other tune, the crispness of the playing is astonishing. Breakneck lines are played at sixteen to the bar with no blurring and no loss of definition (most notably on the cimbalom). The unfamiliar Eastern European melodies and ever-changing rhythms weave confidently across each other at dizzying pace. The orchestration is tightly, precisely managed with no breathing spaces and no time to take stock as one furious burst of playing follows another.
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Barnes's familiar edgy voice appears on a couple of songs. In "I'm Not A Gambling Man", its sudden disconnected foreignness is a fine setting for words that seem to be about a city a thousand years away from Leicester or Albuquerque but which we realise are so much closer to home and more present in our own fears and dreams than we would like:
"And in the cities and the towns / All the banks are closed down. / The bankers have all gone home / To make love to their wives like they were twenty five / And if you lie down by the roadside / And if you lie down by the roadside / Leave some kind of slime beside the roadside".
Penultimate tune "Vasilis Carries A Flaming Skull Through The Forest" is every bit as wonderful and grotesque as it's title. Swaying, sighing, clownish and other-worldly it parades a series of strange and glorious instruments to an ancient kind of drinking lullaby. "Lassú" puts it sweetly, sadly to bed.
This is an album that does demand more attention that many will be prepared to give it. But do not be daunted. Its pleasure are intense.
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