Scoville Units
Posted on 17th February 2011
The Scoville Units
The Scoville Units cd
Get Real Records
Released January 24, 2011
The Scoville Units Bristol CD Launch takes place February 26, 8pm, at the Polish Club
The Scoville Units' debut album is reviewed in other journals, all folk music based. I am not a folk reviewer and, as I see it, this is not a folk album. An acoustic album, yes; instruments associated with folk, yes; tunes that arise out of the folk canon, yes.
But if you had to put your finger on exactly what this is, you would find it difficult.
The Scovilles are Gina Griffin, violin, Rex Preston, mandolin, Ed Boyd, guitar, Josh Clarke, percussions, Miranda Sykes, double bass, and Leon Hunt, banjo, all virtuoso musicians. But this is not an ear-bending display of instrumentalism that leaves one exhausted by the third song. It is real musicianship.
The Scovilles are graceful and delicate; they have musical precision and rapport at a level that can only be achieved by great individual skill, but they make sure that skill is not the point. Very Zen!
The album opens with a hugely rearranged Scarborough Fair that immediately exhibits the Scoville personality; a groove you would not find in folk, time and tempo changes, incredibly rapid and smooth unison runs, jazz-like solos, including a violin solo in which Gina doubles the violin with her voice. The song is a gentle tour de force — and that can be said of the entire album.
Gina Griffin sings three songs: Angeline (the Baker), an old fiddle tune reworked into something else entirely; Cluck Old Hen, another old fiddle tune, now ethereal, plaintive, slighty bluesy, plunging into two grooving instrumental breaks, and White Pebbles that ends the album similarly to Skeeter Davis' End of the World on Bill Frisell's Nashville album. The rest of the album is exquisitely instrumental.
The Bill Frisell comparison is apt; in fact, so is a Pink Floyd one. The Scovilles are taking established forms of music into their own new territory, doing it with graceful musicianship and with a Floydian regard for space in sound. A beautiful album.
Charley Dunlap
Ads by Google:
