Published on Mar 12, 1998
Though I don’t listen to it as much as I’d like to, I love Irish
and Celtic music. The folkiness of the melodies, the lightness of
the songs (even if the lyrics are singing about something dark),
the calm-to-frantic strumming of the mandolins and bowing of the
fiddles – what’s not to love about it?
Lief Sorbye and Michael Mullen, two-fifths of the band Tempest,
branched out to record as Caliban, promoting a music that is not as
much Irish as it is Celtic. (Funny to note that neither member is
from the auld sod; Sorbye is from Norway, and Mullen is from…
Fresno. Go figure.) Their self-titled debut features some music
that makes you want to get up and dance a drunken jig, but it also
makes you long for the backing of a full band.
Make no mistake, Sorbye and Mullen are incredibly capable
musicians. Sorbye switches off on octave-mandolin, mandolin,
bodhran and (though I admit I couldn’t hear it) harmonica, and both
men are very good singers. But when you hear Robert Barry lend his
talents on bass and keyboards, you almost wish that Caliban’s sound
was a bit fuller. Octave-mandolin and fiddle are fine, but I do
miss a touch of drums and tin whistle – then again, this is all a
matter of taste, and doesn’t distract from the music itself.
Both Sorbye and Mullen also show their songwriting talents,
though they stick to composing music to traditional lyric sets –
not that this is a bad thing, mind you. I have yet to hear a
variation on the “John Barleycorn” theme that I haven’t liked, and
“Bold John Barleycorn” is as good as any I’ve heard. Ironically,
the instrumentals are often the most powerful selections on
Caliban; the four-reel “Tipsy Sailor” starts off slowly, but
works itself into a glorious frenzy – you can almost see the
subject in question go from slowly staggering away from a bar to
ending up dancing madly in the middle of the saloon.
This is not to say that the songs with vocals are weak – though
one wonders what possessed Caliban to select a Richard Thompson
song (“Beeswing”) to cover. “What Put The Blood?” is done well a
capella, while “The Journeyman” is an interesting and charming
selection. The highlight is a Norweigan folk song, “Jeg Lagde Meg
Så Silde,” which I would have assumed was in Gaelic had I not
read the liner notes.
So with all the words of praise for
Caliban, could there be any negative points? In one sense, I
do wish that this disc had been a little more – how can I word it?
–
hard-core Celtic. Despite the reliance on traditional songs
and instruments, there still is a sense of laid-back California
style to this disc that doesn’t always feel natural. Maybe fleshing
out the sound a bit with other instruments would have helped this,
I don’t know. Besides that, it occasionally is easy to lose your
focus when you’re listening to this disc – it almost beckons you to
allow it to play in the background. I’m not sure I like that; I
prefer to have what I listen to up front requiring at least partial
concentration. Maybe it’s that
Caliban is hypnotic in a sense.
By no means is
Caliban a bad disc; for fans of Celtic music, this will
provide great enjoyment, and I believe that Sorbye and Mullen will
only continue to get better at their craft. But is it wrong to
suggest that this album could have been a little more Celtic?