This is a lovely CD.
Apart from seeing Dominic aroundÊat the
blowout, the only recording of his playing
I’ve heard before is the Fiendhandle CD I
reviewed a while back. I had some
reservations about some aspects of that
recording but I can honestly say I can think of
nothing to fault Dominic’s current album.
Dominic is joined on
‘Stick’ by Woody Woodward who
accompanies Dom’s piping with guitar,
piano,Appalation dulcimer and a little
percussion. So this album is very much a
duo - basically Fiendhandle minus Simon Raine.
Although that doesn’t do justice to
the CD - as the pipes are the only lead melody
instrument, the album is very much a
bagpipe CD, rather than a band where pipes come
to the fore on occasion. And where overdubbing
has been used, it still retains
it’s duo feel, rather than sounding like
a band. The first ten tracks were all written
by Dominic and are in that French-influenced
style of English piping, while the eleventh
track, ’A none-threatening waltz’
was by Woody. All are well played
pipe-wise, with no tendency towards monotony,
while Woody’s accompaniment is always
thoughtful, varied and adds much to the overall
feel of the Music. My favourite track was
track 4, ‘My evil twin’, which
starts off with pounding piano before Dom kicks
in on pipes with Woody on guitar. The
whole track is nearly thirteen minutes long, a
series of varied melodies with equally varied
accompaniment. Guitar switches back to
piano, back to guitar, then to dulcimer with a
change of tune. I must say I do like the
combination of pipes with Appalachian dulcimer
and would have liked to see more of it on the
album. A nice dulcimer solo kicks off
track 11, while another memorable track is the
sixth, ‘John Entwistle’s
Trombone’, being a slow air solo on pipes
throughout.
You can see from the
titles of tracks already mentioned, Dom’s
sense of humour comes to the fore in this
aspect of the CD, though the music itself is
straight enough - there is however no
explanation as to how the tunes were named: one
can only imagine. Another incident of
Dominic’s sense of humour is track 12,
‘Happy now?’ In this case it does
influence the music, but to find out how
you’ll have to grab yourself a copy of
the album and give it a listen.
All in all a very
listenable, delightful piece of work. Well
worth the investment.
