The Free Wild Wind & The Songs of Birds

Citing Norwegian chamber-prog band Meer and composer Bear McCreary as influences, The Crooked Fiddle Band’s new and lengthily-titled album comprises a sound at once direct and familiar as well as epic and cinematic in scope. They also mention Planxty and Steeleye Span as inspirations and, to be honest, that is enough to put me off ever listening to a band but these guys breathe new life into an otherwise tired formula and there is a reflexivity and, frankly, greater musicianship here that lifts it above the trite warblings of the 70s. There are some songs on this Australian album, but it is chiefly an instrumental one, led, perhaps unsurprisingly, by fiddle melodies that evoke homely emotions on ‘Now Only the Flowers Gather’ but soar to heroic heights on ‘…Frost on the Thistledown’. It is this band’s great understanding of arrangement and timbre that marks them as leaders in their genre; ‘The Wood Wakes’ is a clear example of this with its Godspeed You! Black Emperor guitar riffs and orchestral lushness, while ‘Deadly Nightsnakes’ – with its nyckelharpa and cittern (or some other lutey thing) has an open-world RPG vibe to it that McCreary would no doubt approve of.