Meanders

A Labrador, catching the scent of rabbits in the bushes, sniffs about. ‘Polly in the Wood’, one of several lovely tunes that grace Rob Harbron's first solo album, conjures this image exactly. ‘Like a Christmas Tree’ springs from another canine encounter. Harbron, wandering along a Wiltshire towpath at twilight, met a dog wearing a collar lit with LED lights and the tune ‘popped into my head fully formed.’ ‘Mill Lane’, inspired by an old track near Nether Compton in Dorset, is a leisurely stroll of a tune.

This is a proper solo album, just Harbron and his beautiful 1930s Wheatstone Aeola. It's an English, not an Anglo, concertina; the same note sounds on the push and the pull of the bellows. The pop of the buttons as they are pressed and released provides percussive accompaniment. And this is very English music. Most of the tunes are Harbron's own but, sniffing and digging about, he's flushed out some fine hornpipes from the manuscript of William Irwin, a fiddler from his native Cumbria.

Meanders is the perfect title; several tunes owe their existence to the byways Harbron wanders around. More than this, the distinctive quality of his composing and playing – apparent in his work with Leveret together with Sam Sweeney and Andy Cutting – is the way he rambles around a tune itself, going this way and that, doubling back and then off. Rob Harbron is a musical hound, showing an endless energy and a fine nose for a melody.