Coope Boyes & Simpson

As If

Voices at the Door:
Midwinter Songs and Carols

Private Peaceful

Tripple Echo

Twenty-Four Seven

Fire and Sleet and Candlelight:
Regional and Historic Carols

A Garland of Carols

Reviews

As If
No Masters: NMCD35
Let’s be clear. Coope, Boyes & Simpson thoroughly deserve their reputation for magnificent a cappella harmony singing. This CD, their first in five years, is rich in complex and glorious part-singing at its best, applied to some big and thoughtful songwriting (including their own). It kicks off with a lovely sparse arrangement of Jean Ritchie’s Now Is the Cool of the Day. Elsewhere Richard Thompson’s Keep Your Distance gets a more full-on rhythmic treatment, while they revive Happy Traum’s Golden Bird to good effect. Their haunting reading of Clive James and Pete Atkins’ A Hill of Little Shoes is devastating.
Much of the album is powerfully uplifting, from the tender Float in Dreams, adapted from a Flemish lullaby, to Jim Boyes’ Spring 1919, about post-war reconstruction. Less direct is Michael Marra’s Silence, an elliptical, elusive treasure.
The album pivots rather unevenly around a glorious pairing of Burns’ The Slave Song and the traditional Gaol Song. The combination drives home a social point about both songs. Of the more directly political pieces, I particularly like Boyes’ The Emperor’s New Clothes, a satirical take on how people have made money without actually making things. Other songs take on the resurgence of noxious political formations long dormant, and the impact of political betrayal. You shouldn’t need me to tell you how good a CB&S album could be. But this one is that good.
Paul Cowdell
Review from Folk London - August 2010