Nobody Knows You

One thing that quickly becomes apparent about the Steep Canyon Rangers is that they don’t quite have the degree of swing that a good bluegrass troupe ought to – that infectious rhythmic energy that sweeps you up, dispensing with any need for a drummer. It’s only on the mid-paced, lilting ‘Between Midnight and the Dawn’ – a song that’s like a bluegrass cousin to early Dire Straits – that you feel yourself nodding your head and tapping your foot. Their real trump card, impressive close harmonies, is deftly played on ‘Reputation’, a Beatlesy blues reminiscent of ‘Ticket To Ride’. And there’s another high point in ‘Ungrateful One’, the only song with a lyric to really pack an emotional punch.

Woody Platt, the band’s lead singer, has the requisite manly tenor voice, and song titles such as ‘Love is a Natural Disaster’ tick the country boxes. But there isn’t quite enough personality on display; a situation that isn’t helped by the fact that the overall sound isn’t ‘live’ enough: you don’t get much sense of the room they were in. Anyone who’s ever seen them in concert with their banjo-playing celebrity buddy Steve Martin will know what consummate musicians they are. For their next recording, perhaps they should take a bunch of mics to a local bar somewhere atop their Steep Canyon and play with a rowdy audience to cheer them on: or, to use that buzzword of the UK Olympics, to give them the ‘home advantage’ their musical skills deserve.