Unravelling England

The third album from the Singing Loins since they returned to active duty in 2005, Unravelling England is that rare recording that really deserves to be called folk-punk. Chris Broderick's vocals can conjure up the same sort of joyously bitter snarl that would have earned him a gig at the Vortex back in 1977, but he also has a genuine respect for the traditions of British acoustic music, and his style manages to keep a foot in each plot at once. It helps that he's also a top-shelf songwriter with plenty of different colors at his disposal — he's just as comfortable with the rude good humor of "Cunny Ann" and "Dirty Dora's" and the two-fingers attitude of "Psycho Hippie" and "The Fat Boy of Peckham" as the eloquent heartache of "Since You Were My Girl" and "My Town." Broderick gets excellent support from bandmates Chris Allen on guitars and Rob Shepherd on accordion and banjo, as they fill up the arrangements with admirable efficiency and taste, and inviting guest fiddler Cari Sayers for the sessions was a fine idea. For an album made using a whopping three microphones and recorded in the spare room of the engineer Glenn Barnes' home, the audio is quite impressive, clean and full of presence, and the performances are rich with life and muscle without sounding anything less than natural. And "Everywhere" is as smart, impassioned, and moving a song about love as you're likely to hear this year. Listening to Unravelling England is a bit like stepping into the back room of a pub to hear a brilliant band quietly sawing away, unconcerned with anyone hearing them or not, but in this case you can move back to the first track and confirm that your suspicions were correct — the Singing Loins are just as good as you imagined, and they've made an unpretentiously outstanding album with Unravelling England.