Right at Home: Live at Mount Hooley

Dan Walsh is a busy man. Hot on the heels of his excellent solo record earlier in 2017, Verging on the Perpendicular, the British clawhammer banjo player, singer and songwriter releases this live duo album. His partner here is Northumbrian musician Alistair Anderson, playing mainly concertina, but with a small cameo on Northumbrian pipes. Anderson's home – Mount Hooley – is the setting. The album is made up from house concerts performed over two nights to a small audience, whose clapping and whooping help create the sense of intimacy on the record. And the music? A huge variety: tunes composed by Anderson for local Northumbrian performing groups, Scottish tunes, and bluegrass and old-time tunes. One thread throughout is the quick-fire playing of both artists, especially Walsh, who is on fast-picking, funky form here.
It's a virtuoso set, with many unison melody lines flashing by. Interspersed in between are slower tracks, like the jazzy ‘At Least Pretend’, where Walsh's laidback singing is accompanied by guitar rather than banjo. Anderson is an equal contributor too however, and supplies many of the songs, whether newly composed or traditional tunes, such as a set of 18th-century triple-time hornpipes, the first of which Anderson discovered himself. The slight caveat is that, at 15 tracks, Right at Home is just a little too expansive, and could have benefited from some gentle pruning.