It took me a while to get the first Imagined Village album - perhaps surprisingly so, given the involvement of Simon Emmerson and Eliza Carthy. I think that I paid too much attention to a sniffy review in Mojo. It's still an immensely enjoyable album, even if a bit sprawling and disjointed. This second set (received from Amazon this morning) is a much tighter affair, less beat driven, and with fewer vocalists; the Imagined Village now sound more like a band, less like a concept.
Martin Carthy's back catalogue features strongly, with Byker Hill and two versions of Scarborough Fair as well as the outstanding My Son John. The latter - like Tam Lyn on the first album - is a radical modernisation of a folk standard, as a song about men wounded by cannon fire in the Napoleonic Wars is updated to reflect the experiences of amputee veterens of Blair's wars. Chilling.
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