For the cowpokes
Beautiful
Clip Clop Club
Larrikin Records
Available on CD and cassette
Reviewed by Les Boyd
Do you vaguely remember waiting eagerly for Hopalong Cassidy to crackle onto the B and W tube? Or the Cisco Kid? Gene Autry? Was your faith in the rootin', tootin', fightin' hombres who galloped across the TV screen and broke into song at the most unpredictable moments, never dimmed by the fact that their hats never left theirs heads during fist fights? Do you furtively tap your foot when Johnny Cash comes on the radio? Was "Rawhide" your favourite song in The Blues Brothers?
If you answered yes, then Beautiful, the new album from the eccentric Clip Clop Club, is for you. If you answered no but want to enjoy yourself, it is also for you. CCC hail from the urban badlands of Melbourne and their tongue-in-cheek country and western is inspired by the sing-along cowboy music of the '30s and '40s, the Saturday arvo flicks and bad US cowboy TV shows.
Highlights are a terrific rendition of "Ghostriders in the Sky" and "Cowboy Heaven", a song that suggests God must be a cowperson. Bad taste song of the album goes to a sick little ditty entitled "Dad Found Mum's Hand in a Hay Bale". Most of the songs are original compositions. CCC play live in Melbourne regularly.
Straddling the boundaries
There's Still Time
Justin McCoy
Hat Trick Music through Larrikin
Available on CD
Reviewed by Michael Ahearn
This is an album mainly for acoustic instruments. All the compositions are by McCoy, a founding member of the folk-rock group Hat Trick. He plays guitars, mandolin, keyboards and percussion.
He is ably supported by guest musicians Bernadette McCoy, Mary O'Mahony and Lilo Blyton on violins, Philip Bolliger and Michael Fix on guitars, Mary O'Mahony on recorder and Rob White on bodrán.
An album which presents purely instrumental music must endeavour to achieve as much variety as possible to maintain interest, especially when the main melody instruments are guitar or mandolin. Justin has achieved this variety well, with contrast in style and sound from one track to the next.
While the music is easy to listen to, and worth buying for that reason alone, I found myself wishing the compositions had been a little more unpredictable and adventurous. Apart from the odd excursion into unusual tonalities and scales, all the pieces were in that familiar "folk, acoustic, instrumental" mould.
Perhaps in time, Justin will find his own voice as a composer of this kind of unashamedly tuneful music, which straddles the boundaries of
This is an Australian product well worth supporting if you are a lover of acoustic instrumental music.