I just got Ashley Hutchings' latest release on Topic, "Street Cries" (click here for Topic's description and here for Amazon.co.uk's listing) and listened to it last night. It's a concept album, where Ashley takes trad. songs, and rewrites the lyrics in modern idiom, sets the rewrites to the original tunes and has the results performed by top-notch performers like Dick Gaughan, John Tams, June Tabor, Coope, Boyes and Simpson, etc.

I was a bit disappointed overall with the result. Bob Coltman did something similar, and a lot more successfully, in his "Son of Child" resettings of ballads. I think part of why Coltman's reworkings worked for me and Hutchings' don't as well, is that Coltman also wrote the tunes, so that his settings felt more natural. They conveyed the sense and spirit of the original in a new form. By deciding to keep the traditional tune, Hutchings' settings are discordant in some way; perhaps because I mentally overlay the original lyrics to a familiar tune.

I like his updating on a bunch of the songs, for instance: "Doing Time to Fit Your Crime" AKA The Treadmill Song is recast as a description of modern prison life, describing the dangers from drugs & your fellow inmates and the total waste of 10 years of your life. "He Ran Out of Road" is a great blending of the old and new versions of Salisbury Plain. June Tabor does a chilling rendition of "These Cold Lips", which updates losing your love to press gang to losing your love to a modern act of random gang violence in a pub. Still, I think these all would have worked a little better if Hutchings had been freer with the tunes, although a listener unfamiliar with the originals might not be distracted as I was.

Another thing that I liked about the album is that Hutchings includes the lyrics to both his rewrites and the originals on which they're based. In a provocative essay in the notes, he likens what he's doing to other "Trad" updates of familiar themes, specifically the evolution of the sailor in disguise from the generic "Dark-Eyed Sailor" to the topical "Plains of Waterloo", and argues that the folk process does over time what he's doing with malice aforethought.

All in all, it's an interesting CD, and I think it'll grow on me after several listenings.

Other viewpoints here? BTW, should Mudcat have a regular "Review" category (prefix "REV:"?) for discussions of new folk recordings, books, TV programs and movies?