Jim Moray: Sweet England

On paper I'm a sucker for anything that promises a combination of folk tradition and electronic arrangements. Martin Carthy meets Tangerine Dream or Holger Hiller? Ooh yes, my whiskers are twitching. My antennae, too.

However, despite, or conceivably because of, the speed with which the mainstream folk world seemed to embrace Jim Moray as an Officially Exciting Prospect (he won two awards at the Radio 2 Folk Awards, including best album for Sweet England), I was unconvinced by what I heard at first.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, I found myself in HMV at the start of 2005 with HMV gift tokens to spend, and precious little I could find in their shop that I wanted. So I picked up this.

I've nothing really against it. I happen to find the voice a bit bland, and it seems to me that the electronic arrangements are layered in like a sprinkling of powdery icing without ever penetrating the substance of the songs. It does gall me that the album should be so lauded when Alasdair Roberts' Farewell Sorrow didn't seem to get a mention — the latter has a grain, a gravity and a grasp of a distinct worldview that Sweet England lacks. I've often wondered why Roberts and the mainstream folk world seem to pass each other by (performances at Cecil Sharp House notwithstanding), and I wonder if it might as much Roberts' choice concerning who he associates with as anything else.

Meanwhile Jim Moray has many years ahead of him. His follow-up album completely passed me by: I only found it just now when searching to see if there had been one. But it's after his fifth or sixth that we'll really be able to judge how good Sweet England is.

MusicBrainz entry for this album