Review: Belshazzar's Feast - Find the Lady

It's a busy few months for instrumentalist and singer Paul Sartin of Bellowhead and Belshazzar's Feast - the duo's latest release follows hard upon Hedonism and two tours follow. Find the Lady is an intriguing album, produced by Jim Moray who belies his own albums' avant-gardism with a broadly conservative production here. Deprived of dancers and audience interplay, Sartin and Paul Hutchinson (who has his own side project in three-piece Hoover the Dog) exhibit their eminence sincerely on an accomplished album of (mostly) traditional music.

Sartin's ancestors' sang for the Hammond Brothers, song-collecting contacts of Cecil Sharp. One of these ballads - the stately Turtle Dove - is performed with particular gravity to an engaging arrangement, while the instrumental tunes are as absorbingly delivered (try the splendid Bloomsbury Market/Hypermarket). Moray and additional guests Jackie Oates and Pete Flood add subtle contributions to the well-orchestrated set, with Sartin alternating on fiddle and oboe to accompany Hutchinson's ever-present accordion.

There is thus much to muse about even before the interruption of knowingly silly Primus Hornpipe, featuring a succession of "guest" cloggers, à la The Intro and the Outro. Breaking the reverie for revelry is not a bad idea and I smiled in spite of myself at wryly wrought references (My Old Man, anyone?); such whimsy is later lacking from the promisingly titled Circle of Biscuits that alas proves rather more dull. Courtly Royal Flush / Elephant Stairs injects late élan ahead of the atmospheric, ambitious final track, a rendition of the evocative poem Home Lad, Home. Find the Lady perhaps wants for a bit of gristle - and I'm not sure the two Pauls quite manage to stamp their personality right through the record - but this is a well-balanced and affecting album of craftsmanship and enthusiasm.