YES

You can sometimes tell quite a lot about a band by the company they keep and this trio's biography boasts praise from the likes of Chumbawamba's Jude Abbott, the redoubtable squeezebox maestro John Spiers and Jack Rutter from the Seth Lakeman Band. So you wouldn't be too far off the mark in expecting to hear a splendid disregard for musical boundaries, but with a respect for English traditional music, plus a penchant for pithy political commentary and an admiration for irony. This you get, all set to some highly danceable tunes from across the world. Featuring Simon Care on melodeon and concertina, with Nina Zella on keyboards and vocals, and brass and percussion from Tim Walker, Banter style themselves ‘the world’s smallest big band,' but they can make a pretty big noise whenever it suits them. The opener is John Kirkpatrick's ‘Jump at the Sun’, all jaunty jiggery-pokery until the brass bursts in like a good-natured drunken reveller arriving at a party. There's also room for gentleness, though, as on Zella's ‘Matthew Loves Mark’, admonishing those who disapprove of same-sex relationships, or rueing her own poor life choices with the self-explanatory ‘Fell in Love With an Idiot’.