Give & Receive

The husband-and-wife Americana duo of Dorothy Daniel and Ben DeBerry, both of whom sing and play acoustic guitar, are assured and confident songwriters and performers. They have some gifted musicians backing them up, too. However, they are ploughing a very crowded field. Songs such as ‘Don’t Drink the Water’ conjure up an atmosphere of sorts via textural acoustic guitar from DeBerry and bluesy but precise fiddle from Christian Sedelmeyer. But there's little to distinguish Daniel's country-ish singer-songwriter's voice from hundreds of other country-ish singer-songwriters. That almost all the songs are slow-to-mid-tempo doesn’t help either. ‘Get Back Home’, is a little perkier than the album's norm, benefitting from some classic country close harmonising.

But it's really only on one track – ‘Long Song’ – that the album wakes itself up. An uptempo bluegrass track, it features DeBerry on lead vocal, and his more distinctive, cutting voice gives the song some attitude. In classic bluegrass style, all the band get a chance to shine, with Sedelmeyer's nimble fiddling and Ethan Ballinger's expert mandolin dancing joyously. It sounds like a totally different band, one that's a lot more fun than the soporific Americana-lite that is the Danberrys’ default mode. Nothing else on the album comes close to recapturing those energy levels.