If you're looking for a record to put a spring in your step, then you need look no further than Furnace Mountain's fifth album.
It was funded by Kickstarter and is only available from their website.
This four-piece band take their name from the mountain in Loudoun County, Virginia near where they grew up.
This is a part of world where music is not so much a tradition as a way of life. Bluegrass and acoustic folk/country is the soundtrack to any social gathering and all members of the band can trace back the roots to this sound from their own family backgrounds.
To get a more spontaneous feel, the album was recorded live in the studio over a two-day period in front of a live audience (although the applause has been edited out).
The band's main singer is Aimee Curl whose homely and natural sounding voice is well complimented by the harmony vocals of Morgan Morrison. These two women also play upright bass and bouzouki guitar respectively.
The men are David Van Deventer and the album's producer Danny Knicely who both play fiddle and Knicely also plays mandolin.
While the majority of the tracks are adaptations of traditional songs, there are notable exceptions like Fol de Rol, which sets a WB Yeats' poem, Crazy Jane Reproved, to music and a breezy, and surprisingly effective, Bluegrass version of Bob Dylan's I Want You.
Other original tunes are Who Could Blame Them by fellow Virginian singer-songwriter Nathan Moore and The Nightshift Lullaby by Jason Molina which appeared on Magnolia Electric Co's 2007 album What Comes After The Blues.
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As is typical of old-timey material, the sunny tunes often mask some dark secrets. For instance, Barney is a song of a hunter who declares his love for another woman and is murdered with a pen knife by his former 'true love' for his trouble.
In a similarly chilly vein, The Crow On The Cradle,written by Sydney Carter during the cold war of the 1960s, is about a bird which foretells a bleak future for a newborn child "The crow on the cradle, The black on the white, Somebody's baby is born for a fight"
Despite this, the inclusion of several hoedowns and a swing version of Bonaparte's Retreat help keep the overall mood upbeat and the freshness and vitality of the band's sound is more likely to make you smile than to give you nightmares.
Music like this has been recorded and enjoyed for over a century and Furnace Mountain illustrate that the future is in secure hands.
Furnace Mountain's website
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