Alden Patterson & Dashwood – By the Night
Self Released – 26 June 2018
Alden Patterson & Dashwood is a plainly-’n’-honestly-named Norwich-based trio comprising Christina Alden (vocals, guitar), Alex Patterson (fiddle, vocals) and Noel Dashwood (dobro, vocals). They formed in late 2015, and released an unpretentious, unexpectedly award-winning and quietly impressive debut CD, Call Me Home, in the third quarter of 2016.
Alden Patterson & Dashwood’s unashamed stock-in-trade is equally honest-to-goodness, homespun, folky Americana-tinged music. The homespun element extends out from the music into its appealing presentation – lovingly handmade, hand-printed CD cover with appealing and welcoming artwork matching the tenor of the music within, encasing a simple card four-page insert giving all the information one needs concerning the songs’ origins and sources and the band members and the instruments they play. The one-to-one intimacy of this approach to communicating with their listeners is already known to those who’ve been privileged to see the trio live, and there’s a gentle, settled confidence in this intimacy that’s very winning indeed. For the Alden Patterson & Dashwood sound is a gently woven yet refreshingly uncluttered tapestry of dobro, fiddle and guitar with well-judged (and quite innovative) harmonies bedding in behind Christina’s lead vocal that contains just the right element of rough edge to hit home. These guys clearly have a well-developed ear for the “less is more” tenet, and there’s never any sense of instrumental overload or of the need for grandstanding in their easy, natural musicianship.
Whereas two-thirds of the trio’s debut album consisted of self-penned original songs, that proportion has reduced to four out of ten tracks for their new offering, alongside one self-penned instrumental written by Noel “to combat the difficulty of stage nerves and playing a fretless instrument” – not that they need worry about stage nerves, judging by the relaxed, settled demeanour of their music-making. This statement shouldn’t imply that laid-back means laid-out… for there’s a sense of commitment that matches their intimacy and a keen sense of purpose that inhabits each and every song they tackle, whatever its subject-matter.
This time around, there’s been a shift in the trio’s own songwriting in that the erstwhile uncomplicated, fairly contented and slightly ruminative thought-processes of Call Me Home have been replaced by more direct inspirations from literary stimuli. Both the title track and The Time Song arose in response to the reading of specific novels; The Cobbler’s Daughter is based on a story about a couple who went missing in 1942 in the Swiss Alps and whose bodies were only discovered in 2017; and Kingfish was inspired by scenes from David Attenborough’s BBC series Africa showing the illogical behaviour of these creatures.
The remaining five tracks are quite individual arrangements of traditional songs: three of these (Bonnie Blue Eyes, Red Rocking Chair and Railroad) are of American origin, while the other two come from English stock. The interesting thing about these arrangements is that these Alden Patterson & Dashwood covers are definitely customised. In other words, that the trio have either written entirely new melodies – in the case of Bonnie Blue Eyes, and Ten Thousand Miles (for all that they claim their version of the latter was inspired by that of Nic Jones) and Blow The Wind (Southerly) – or reshape their material with a degree of vigorous invention that’s perhaps unexpected even in the current revival climate. Red Rocking Chair works very well a capella, while they were inspired to sing Railroad after hearing the version by Crooked Still.
There’s a quiet, easy charm about Alden Patterson & Dashwood’s distinctive little musical niche, yet its very simplicity of execution is deceptive, for it can conceal an inventiveness and sense of challenge that I find every bit as beguiling.
www.aldenpattersonanddashwood.com