Junction Pool's debut album reviewed at the Garden Sessions

Junction Pool Debut Album

*****

Junction Pool debut album featuring Harris Playfair, James Thomson, Jamie Young, Laura Grime, Gillian Payne, Orren Karp, John Riley, Ryan Playfair, Tamir Karp, Charles Dearness, Chuck Barton, Jo Stark, Chris Payne & guest Neil Cuthbertson

See junctionpool.com

Review by Jack Foster

The aptly titled 'Big Wellie Set' opens the album, a raging opener which manages to dance effortlessly between a multitude of genres whilst still bearing the folk (or folk/rock) standard, it's a Sunday afternoon in Sandy Bells, it's a field full of hippies at a Peatbog Faeries gig, it's radio city music hall, it's Wolfstone, it's... Well, it's what happens when you bring together thirteen of the brightest musical stars on the Scottish Borders music scene and it flies in the face of those who say that folk music is far from a progressive genre.

Harris Playfair's Piano & Keyboards are the glue which holds the album together, though sometimes contradicting all known laws of folk - the Jazz chords, backed by the big band shouldn't work with traditional/traditional style tunes, but they do - beautifully. Orren Karp is described as Junction Pool's very own Jimi Hendrix, and he opens 'Funky Whippets'. For the first minute it's funk through and through, then a fiddle joins the party, and it's folk-funk fusion, the brass comes in and it's jazz-folk-funk, back to funk - and - back to folk - and then it truly is Hendrix at Woodstock.

My favourite track on the album though is 'Kincardine Lads' - though that's because I'm a folkie through and through, and a songster as opposed to a tunester (not that I don't enjoy a good tune though). It's the closest you'll get to a folk standard on the album, but it's still very much Junction Pool.

As you can see, it's very difficult to describe the Junction Pool sound, as each comparison contradicts the last. Suffice to say - Junction Pool's sound is extremely ecclectic, and a very succesfull fusion of genres (it has to be heard to be believed). Great things surely beckon.

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