Two Dollar Bash: Lost River (Cannery Row Records CRR0806)
An amiable acoustic four piece, Two Dollar Bash are veterans of a European wide music scene, playing music that is their own particular distillation of folk, country, blues and bluegrass influences. There is electric guitar here, on occasion, but there isn't too much in the way of drums; rather, we have the interplay of guitars, bass, banjo, mandolin and mandola with Mark Mulholland's lap steel and Matt de Harp's harmonica extending the atmospheric range. There's no stars here, just four guys taking turns at contributing a song and providing the lead vocal to go with it. Kind of like CSNY, without the monstrous egos, I hope and with booze as the drug of choice, I suspect. Also, it has to be said, without the strength of vocal performance. Tony Rose is the best of them, vocally, and has a pleasing, blues-y gruffness to his singing but otherwise too often there's a sense of the singing teetering on the edge of falling off-key.
The songs pretty much all follow the same sort of themes; these guys are like old-fashioned troubadours, forever on the road, living their lives in the twilight hours with the smell of drink and the easy bonhomie of bar life - and this is what they sing about: playing "in this old cafe/For nickels and dimes, it ain't St Tropez". For us, the audience, we can have the vicarious pleasure of getting the feel of their lives whilst, perhaps, feeling comfortable in our safer, more predictable 9 to 5 lives . For their part, for every occasion when they can celebrate the high points of life on the road, they are almost as often looking back over their shoulders at more settled lives they might have had. Whenever the balance is weighed, it always comes down on the side of the addictive pleasures of the troubadour's life: "I hear the highway calling me/ Just like it's done all down the years". The poignancy of this album, for me, comes from theact that I know one of these songs from fifteen or so years ago; "Further Down The Road", written by Joe Armstrong and Mark Mulholland, was sung by Mark on a tape he recorded with Andi Neate in the mid-90s. Then, it's theme of the happy-go-lucky fellow, just passing through, had the carefree optimism apparent in its chorus: "I'll see you further down the road/somewhere along the line/Don't let those dark nights get you down/everything will work out fine". Now, Mark's older, cracked voice and Matt's blues-y harp undermines the lyrical optimism and gives the sense that the road has provided no answers over the years and that it does, indeed, have an end. No longer does the road go on forever.
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The chief strength of Lost River is the musical interplay of these four guys, comfortable with each other and absolutely in love with making music. At their best their songs are warmly atmospheric and redolent of lives full of rich experience; I reckon an evening in their company would give you a nice warm feeling about the wealth of possibilities life has to offer.
John Davy www.nessmp3.com/music/biscuitsandgravy
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