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The Fold are a band that have been around since 1994 as a live act but I doubt many of you are aware of their work. In a way they highlight the crime of the music industry, a crime that promotes half-baked fashion bands on the strength of image rather than ability. To be highly regarded by their contemporaries and fans should be enough, but the fact that the rhythm section of this band also moonlight in a tribute band to Jethro Tull, some of the most intricate music of the modern age outside classical composition, gives you an idea of the benchmark that this band works from. The major crime being committed here is that whilst lesser musicians bathe in the glory of the rock and roll lifestyle these musicians go back to their day jobs when all the fun is over, the great rock and roll swindle if ever there was one, or is that rock and folk swindle? It would be easy to describe the band as a straightforward folk rock band, but that would be doing them as a disservice to them, a lazy cop out on the part of the reviewer, as there is much more to the music than such a tag would conjure. Mention the word folk and images of Arran sweaters, pipes and beards spring to mind, singing with one finger in the ear of medieval summer meadows, and the men aren't much better. Well if that is the image that folk music brings to mind to you then maybe this band is a lesson that you need to take to bring yourself up to speed on the current folk scene.

Opening on a solo violin, an instrument which will play a large part in the music to follow, there seems nothing new to break the stereotypical image here, that is until the rest of the band pile into "Tumbling Down" the pace quickens the violin ups a gear to provide a sweet and memorable hook for the song and we are off, surfing a wave of dance inspired folk rhythms. Dance is the word here, although a term hi-jacked and now come to be associated with manufactured electronic studio music, this is dance music in the truest sense of the word, music that connects with the heart and the foot and defies you to keep still through out. Whether you experience this live or on the CD it's a challenge that is hard to resist. "Head" charges off with the same drive and is a much more difficult beast to put a genre too. An eclectic mix of new age experimentalism, folk sensibility and driven back beats and drum shuffles this, almost instrumental, offering is a measure of not only the bands musicianship but also of their writing ability and scope. Calming

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