I’ve got a lot of time for Red Moon Joe. They have actually been around since 1985 and released their first album in 1990. They only lasted a few years until Mark Wilkinson decided to hit the road as a session musician and folded the band. The next real activity was 20 years later (!) when he got the original band together again – David A Smith on bass, Paul Casey on drums and David Fitzpatrick on banjo, mandolin & harmonica – along with Steve Conway and they recorded their second album ‘Midnight Trains’ in 2010. That shows a certain love for the band. This album is probably their best yet.
It sits fairly square in the apex of Americana, Bluegrass and country but considering that they are Brits, the music avoids the mawkish sentimentality of a lot of the genre and the playing is actually quite superb.
The songs are quality tales of the feelings that invest us as we age and of the complexities of life in the 21st Century. From the opener ‘Slow Sun Wheeling’ with its grand riff over sweet pedal steel and sublime harmonies and celebrating the joy of a life well lived and rich with experience to ‘The High Lonesome’ which carries the country theme along and into ‘Psychedelic Sid’ a simply gorgeous tale of the love affair between a man and his axe, these are all tracks that bear up to repeated listening.
‘Orgreave’ is a song to the miners of Orgreave colliery and their battles against Thatcherism – odd to hear a non-Yorkshire vocal style in a song about a very British event but a great track nonetheless.
The album works on many levels and they really do have something more than the standard bands about them.
