May

You may well have seen and enjoyed The Sweet Lowdown on their first UK tour recently. They’re an award-winning, all-female trio from Victoria, Canada, with a penchant for old-time music and bluegrass. However, they are ready, willing and able to turn their dextrous hands to pretty much anything that takes their fancy, from Irish to Indian music. So the music from Amanda Blied (guitar), Shanti Bremner (banjo) and Miriam Sonstenes (fiddle) can be an intoxicating brew when they let rip, vocally or musically. But May, produced by Adrian Dolan, can sometimes seem to lack the genuine wild abandon that makes a good group something special, allowing original material to genuinely break new ground while respecting their roots.

Ironically, they seem to truly let go on the album's pair of traditional tunes, ‘Sail Away Ladies’ and ‘Reuben's Train’ (mostly taken from the Doc Watson & Clarence Ashley version), rather than on any of the ten original tunes heard here. Perhaps the amount of time they each spend teaching their craft to others has contributed to some reticence on their part. But ‘lowdown’ is invariably better than ‘sweet’, if you ask me.