summer album of the week 07/25/09
fairport convention: unhalfbricking (released july 1969)
For its third album, Fairport offered not only a band defining album, but a genre-defining one by turning British folk-rock into a Top 20 hit. A young Richard Thompson offered the Dickensian Genesis Hall, an already elegant Sandy Denny (whose parents grace the album cover) served the agelessly poetic Who Knows Where the Time Goes? and the full band turned the folk relic A Sailor’s Life into a neo-psychedelic meditation. And then there was Dylan. How curious that this most overt of British folk ventures would sport three Bob Dylan works, including an epic, Oliver Twist-tinted Percy’s Song. Unhalfbricking was bittersweet, though. A van crash killed drummer Martin Lamble two months before the album’s release. Quite unexpectedly the folky spiritualism with given some very earthly grounding.
I am a native Kentuckian and freelance journalist who has been writing about contemporary music for the Lexington Herald-Leader since 1980. I have not a lick of honest musical talent myself, just a pair of appreciative ears for jazz, folk, blues, bluegrass, Americana, soul, Celtic, Cajun, chamber, worldbeat, nearly every form of rock 'n' roll imaginable and, when pressed, the occasional tango and polka.