Groanbox

Groanbox

(Groanbox)

Originally a duo who first seduced Scottish audiences with rugged, bluesy roots music interlaced with the kind of accordion virtuosity that you might expect from someone who had Carnegie Hall, New York commissions on his CV, the now four-piece Groanbox celebrate the group’s tenth anniversary with a sixth album that belies its start-from-scratch, DIY, lakeside retreat origins through passages of pop sophistication that call to mind 10cc’s heyday. Their rootsy fascinations still show, chiefly with the African patterns that inform several of the tracks, but there are also suggestions at times of Pat Metheny communing with exotic fauna (or perhaps even with Mike Oldfield or Terry Riley) and Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks-style lounge lizardry on the mischievously catchy, calypso-esque vocal, The Face That You Deserve. Other flavours such as New Orleans piano grooves and horns, Erik Satie meets industrial percussion, and Eastern European gypsy music waft in and out of an album that somehow pulls these many diverse influences into an ultimately quite charming whole.

Rob Adams