sethlakeman-poormansheaven music reviews Virgin Media
Folk favourite targets the rock crowd.
Seth Lakeman's got a great name for a folk artist. He sounds like he's walked straight out of a gloomy Thomas Hardy novel about the trials of lovelorn peasants. It's a shame, then, that on this, his fourth solo album, he's made a belated dash for the late 20th century and gone horribly 'rock' on us.
It's not that it's impossible to combine folk and rock effectively. It's just that we're not talking The Pogues here. The shadow that hangs over this record is that of Chris De Burgh in his Don't Pay The Ferryman period. Except Chris had pretty good tunes and lyrics which weren't so embarrassingly literal and ham-fisted.
So Poor Man's Heaven is absolutely brilliant for roughly ten percent of its running time, when Seth's got the fiddle out and is sawing away like he's duelling with the devil. The rest of the time, with his earnest, hectoring voice and songs about shipwrecks it's like being accosted by a humourless chugger for the RNLI.
More to try:
Chris De Burgh: The Getaway
The Levellers: Levelling The Land
Pete Seeger: Greatest Hits
Counting Crows: Recovering The Satellites
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