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around campfires, of summer evenings and countryside. Maybe I think too much and maybe I am and aging hippy at heart but that's where my mind goes to this sort of music and I'm just trying to explain what dance music can mean to those with a broad enough mind to accept that its not all about 120bpm Ibiza anthems. "Reach For Heaven" is a song that is firmly in the territory that the Levellers, the combination of violin and acoustic guitar sounds like it could have come from the aforementioned return to their roots album "Green Blade Rising". Incidentally the Fold recently played a support set for The Levellers and were very well received not only by the bands fans but also particularly by the band themselves.

"Feeling the Same" starts off in the same mellow fashion as the last song but after a minute of smooth silky licks kicks off into a more driven direction. Again the back beat and a repetitive guitar riff creates the foundation for the violin and vocals to work their magic. The album is rounded off by the only song that sounds like a traditional folk tune. Sung both in English and French, "Toujours Avec Toi" is a where Joanna Shiel gets all the vocal glory over some straightforward guitar work, augmented only by a distant tenor sax, not what you would normally expect in a song of this type and some incidental guitar lead. And where the song kicked in, in gloriously up beat fashion, it fades out in ethereal splendour, the journey is over and a lesson in contemporary folk has been completed. As I said on the way in, there is a lot more going on here that the tag folk music suggests and it's a CD which will appeal to purists and more general listeners alike, in fact anyone that appreciates very original and evolved music will find this very much to their tastes.

Although, unfortunately, this is not the sort of thing that you can pick up in the shops they do have an online shop facility at their site at: http://www.thefold.co.uk/index .php?thissection=1 and there you can also find out where the band are gigging, something that is well worth catching. If folk music seems an alien and somewhat whimsical music genre then this is the CD to make you re-evaluate things that you may have otherwise taken for granted.

Learn more about this author, Dave Franklin.
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