Dear Scotland

They neatly sidestep the fact that this album has a few more songs on it than I normally think is wise by deft sequencing and snappy songwriting. The songs themselves are pretty bloody lean – no noodling and no extra choruses – and at about that three-quarter mark, where fourteen-song albums can start to lag a little, the songs come at you thick and fast: five of six don’t reach the three minute mark. So I may still have been tempted to trim the album down a little, but this kind of pace and the sheer energy of the actual band themselves give Crystals Fall real momentum.

A lot of bands get as far as a couple of singles and an EP and basically exhaust their material, and it gives me great personal satisfaction to see how Sparrow & the Workshop have consistently beaten this particular devil over the last couple of years. Certain tracks, like the title song, don’t quite capture the sheer vitality of the band at their best, but in general every time a fresh batch of songs has emerged, they have been of the highest quality.

For music which is in most senses composed of pretty familiar elements, they also rather impressively manage to steer clear of being predictable. You can hear folk, country and rock in there, but I can’t think of many bands to actually compare them to. They’re bloody brilliant though, whatever they are.