Heritage

'A journey into the Heart of America's Greatest Folk Songs'. So the sleeve proclaims. In truth it might better read 'self-indulgent musings of a muso let loose in a recording studio'.

On the face of it, any attempt to gather a gabhail of folk songs and rejuvenate them with new voices and sympathetic arrangements would seem like a spiffingly good idea. But when that gathering catches itself in a mire of self-absorption, and meanders hither and fro with not a whit of momentum or a sense of purpose, it all dissolves into one big morass of ego and narcissism.

There are songs aplenty with a backbone, well worthy of our attention. From the lynchpin of Jane Siberry's 'Shenandoah', bookending such classics as 'The Water Is Wide' and 'Down In The Willow Garden', anyone with even a passing interest in the Irish/Appalachian crossover will be drawn to lend an ear.

But the arrangements are soporific in the extreme. Tim O'Brien's reading of 'The Water Is Wide' is a prime example. Plodding, aimless and seemingly endless (at 6 m 38s), it epitomises the purposeless drifting mood of the entire collection.

Even Mary Chapin Carpenter isn't invulnerable: 'Pretty Polly', at a lumbering 8 min 43 seconds, can't rise to a gallop amid Anger's self-conscious violins, cellos and mandolins.

Yes, there is the occasional reprieve. Willie Nelson's 'Hard Times Come Again No More' is suitably bare and perfectly paced, and the Cajun ballad, 'La Ville Des Manteau' from Michael Doucet swings high and low, buoyed by an incandescent bayou spirit. Sadly, these only suggest what might have been. The seed of the idea that begot Heritage is one that could've blossomed so much better, taller and brighter.