One of those mea culpa moments, this one. Your reviewer has quietly been enjoying this one on the side for about the last two months while allowing it to be swamped in the stampede of pre-Christmas releases all desperate for consideration in the festive rush.
So now that lunacy's all died down for a while, let's dust ourselves off, take a breath and fully enjoy the depth and diversity of one of those great, all-things-considered acts of stylistic piracy that constitutes RALFE BAND'S debut album "Swords."
The one thing that may well immediately throw you is the band's connection with the Skint label. One assumes this is because of their Brighton roots rather than anything involving dance-related cred because if you're automatically expecting big beats, loops and hard-edged techno then you're at the wrong party, because Ralfe Band's weird and wonderful world is made up of elements of everything from Gregorian chants and Eastern European waltzes through to rustic, XTC-ish pop charm and downbeat acoustic slivers akin to the sort of thing Beck achieved circa "One Foot In The Grave."
For the uninitiated, Ralfe Band are Oly Ralfe (vocals, guitar, piano, organ), multi-instrumentalist Andrew Mitchell and John Greswell (viola, keyboards), Ben Nicholls (mandolin, lap steel) and drummer Stefan Melzak. Collectively, they are musical magpies par excellence and their fervent creativity creates a surprisingly cohesive as well as quirkily fascinating palette as they paint in "Swords"' rich canvas of sound.
They sure have a predeliction for waltzes, an' all. "Swords" includes a slew of the buggers and they're all great. The album opens and concludes with two excellent, filmic set-pieces "Frascati Way Southbound" and "Siberia" (the first sounds akin to the Tindersticks and Lincoln jamming in a Lithuanian church and the later finds violins billowing slowly across the distant Steppes), while excellent songs like "Albatross Waltz" makes like Nick Cave fronting the under-rated Flipron with instruments supplied by Harry Partch. And yes, my children, that is indeed a hefty compliment.
Elsewhere, Ralfe and co hijack styles apparently at will, but always skilfully twist them into recognisable shapes of their own. "1500 Years", for example, is a folksy and playful 2-step akin to a downbeat Calexico/ Violent Femmes with accordion and upright piano exchanging solos and a great, Bill Monroe-style yodelly bit. "Arrow & Bow" is equally atmosperic and slightly disturbing with its' lonely, Tindersticks-ish piano, malevolent cemetary- jazz horns and what sounds like pissed-up Gregorian monks supplying spooky lines like "time waits for no man/ he's following you in his black van." Oooh! Chilly!
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The atmosphere and edge is nearly always tempered by the band's effusive sense of humour, however, and there are also loads of great touches like the surreal lyrical aspects ("dogs are everywhere/ they're in my hair") of the Turko-French cross-pollination of "Broken Teeth" and the so-black-it's-hilarious plot of "Bruno Mindhorn" with it's monologue-style vocal from Ralfe and madcap story of a guy who's "in love with a woman with no eyes/ I found her drawing cows in Bruges." As you do on a long weekend away, like. Oh, and I almost forgot: "Broken Teeth Song" is surely the third in that lineage of great songs featuring barking dogs after The Small Faces' "The Universal" and The Clash's "Somebody Got Murdered." So there.
There's much more, of course, not least the downbeat and blues-y "Parkbench Blues" and the mad, rustic balalaika of "Crow", but really "Swords" is one of those wonderful, vive la difference records that will have you marvelling and wondering how the hell they were cheeky enough to pull THAT and THAT and THAT off for months to come. A late runner in the best of 2005 stakes and one to be cherished in the future.
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