PETER KNIGHT’S GIGSPANNER - The Wife Of Urban Law
Private Label GSCD006
Peter Knight (fiddle, keyboards, mandolin, vocals) and Roger Flack (guitar, bass, vocals) are joined by Sacha Trochet (percussion, bass, vocals) on this fourth album in presenting six typically imaginative, atmospheric and sensitive renditions of traditional material, the Steeleye Span song, Seagull, about the game of Shove Penny (re-titled Penny The Hero and given a South African rhythmic vibe embellished with some progressive pizzicato mastery), and two newly composed instrumentals.
The second of these, Lament For The Wife Of Urban Law (Chipping Norton’s Elizabeth Law – died 28 January 1884, aged 69 - being the gravestone inscribed ‘beloved’ of Urban and lamented subject here), is a brilliant tour de force of fiddle techniques combined with occasional death knelling percussive strokes to create a strikingly edgy and befitting plangency. Opening instrumental piece, Urban’s Reel, is an appealingly well crafted composition marred only by the percussion’s relative loudness.
Spencer The Rover, slow paced but with crisp rhythmic punch, is interfused with a sublime sequence of shimmery legato fiddle. The essentially mournful song Green Gravel, founded on the children’s playground circle game, is driven and grounded on a dramatic rhythmic pattern subtly decorated with faintly unsettling eastern sound tinctures. Irish hornpipe, The Blackbird, live recorded, has the fiddle freely soaring over pulsing percussive and bass patterns interlocking with the guitar’s lightly and sensitively inflected tonal and chordal contribution. Each typifies the trio’s ethos of creating fresh contemporary reinterpretations of song standards; highly catchy here, hypnotically captivating there, peerless with poise, Gigspanner is without question distinctively sui generis.
www.gigspanner.com
Kevin T. Ward
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