This is cheerful stuff. Principal band member Oly Ralfe has a Will Oldham inflection in voice and tunes and there's a no-nonsense attitude to production and performance standards. Full contact with the RALFE BAND thing will get some folk straight away while others are reaching for coats. A bit like the Mighty Boosh TV series that the band have played a part in. A bit, too, like Ralfe's deliberately inept but charming drawings on the CD cover and website.
"Women of Japan" itself is the third track to emerge in single format from the bands' debut album "Swords". On the video enhanced CD (the splendid video won Best Music Video at this year's South By South West convention) there are two new tracks: "Run Down The Lane" and "Sleepwalk at the Carnival". The 7" vinyl has "Dead Duke", another new recording. So there's plenty to go at. It's all available from the website.
"Women of Japan" is a cowboy waltz of a song, with those Oldham harmonies and some fairly cracked sounding metalophone making it very interesting and wholemeal. The hacking cough early on, the eccentric sound levels and the rather gloves-on guitar picking make it a bit too kitchen sink for my taste, but I wouldn’t let it put you off. They guy's got something special here.
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"Run Down The Lane" has folk music paw prints all over it, with a nice bit of Silent Movie piano on the margins. If the pr blurb hadn’t mentioned Syd Barrett I probably would have done. So there. Syd Barrett with an inventive but mad producer.
"Sleepwalk At The Carnival" echoes the waltz time of "Women of Japan". But maybe the cultural oddness of a "carnival" with a dressed up monkey is a bit too lyrically careless? Even magical realism needs to start in some real place, and this risks being a fantasy made of nothing but TV magazine and Beano/Dandy cut-outs.
www.ralfeband.com
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