Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 10/10/05
Label: Skint

This is most surprising: rambling folk rock nutters on Skint Records. The Brighton home of Fatboy Slim and all things Biggish of Beats. It just doesn't sit right. The label actually had a stab at this type of thing with country band Lucky Jim (remember them?) a couple of years back, but this is ridiculous. Or perhaps not. After all, Brighton is the dog-on-a-string tin-whistle capital of the UK. And home of The Levellers. Perhaps that collision of dance and drunken sailor's reels was inevitable all along.

Brainchild of Oly Ralfe, The Ralfe Band are actually more eclectic than that. Championed by the late John Peel, their music is more a collision of whimsical Syd Barrett, creaking film noir soundtracks and surrealistic sea shanties. And despite the overhanging influence of Will Oldham, particularly on Ralfe's vocal style, it also sounds very, very British.

Wading in with the rolling lo-fi instrumental waltz "Frascati Way South Bound", these wayward vocal talents are first heard on "Women Of Japan", where Ralfe sagely intones us he wants to roll us across the ocean to find "the man who kissed all the women of Japan". Then he's croaking about a "chargrilled accountant from Spain", which frankly suggests that he's winging it somewhat. An impression cemented by the rudimentary percussion and cowbell that clatters away happily in the background and a burst of yodelling on the next track, "1500 years".

Quite how the wider public will accept these eccentricities is perhaps questionable. Certainly, for every other wryly bizarre track about dog phobia ("Broken Teeth Song") there's a lapse into 'I'm-weird-me' zaniness that approximates a bad Chris Morris sketch. Still, you can't accuse Ralfe of lacking invention and, with "Albatross Waltz" and "Park Bench Blues", he pulls a couple of real pearlers from his poacher's sack. Stumbling melodies meet rag and bone man rhythms, only to veer off in intricate meandering patterns. The whole thing just whirring along like some weird mechanical mouse organ until the beatific closer "Siberia" simply runs out of steam.

Which makes "Swords" something of a wayward, and occasionally infuriating album, but not without it's own sweet and individual charm. Brighton rocks again. Sort of. Rather shambolically.

    by Adam Webb