From the muddy banks of the Mississippi Delta in South West London come four young men known as The Happy Few.
Although the band's name comes from the rousing St Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry V ("We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...") their cultural roots on this album lie far from the UK.
Empty Boxes (a download only release) is a stripped back sound replicating the old time blues. The arrangements are so minimal (slide and finger style guitar, double bass, kick drum, vocals) that it could easily pass for a solo album.
Most of the album consists of original tunes but includes what they call "creative workings of classic blues tracks" . These are the type of songs popularised by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt and our good old friend John Henry makes a cameo appearance.
Only a reframing of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square , a popular British song from the 1930s, offers a brief shift in location away from the U.S.
The power of the blues lies in the fact that the themes are so universal. There are worried men with women trouble the world over and the oppression of the working man is not determined by geographical boundaries. In this sense it could be argued that the location of the artist is irrelevant.
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However, some contemporary reference points would have helped to add a fresh dimension to familiar territory
We Happy Few are a talented bunch but there's no getting away from the fact that the songs here just don't have any where near the raw, authenticity of the sources.
How could they?
Instead what we have is a young man trying, unconvincingly, to sing in an appropriately world weary baritone voice as he relates tales of the evils of cocaine, back breaking work out in the fields or life on the railroads.
Can white men sing the blues? Yes, but only if something of their own life experience is added to the mix. Empty Boxes comes across as an exercise in style rather than an attempt to bring anything fresh to the table.
We Happy Few on myspace
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