Pastures New – Blind River Scare (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Blind River Scare has always been a great reminder that when it comes to roots genres, the lines blur easily. Country music is just folk with a fancy hat, or perhaps folk is country under smaller skies. The point is it all comes from a common source and it is where those cultures and traditions co-exist that Blind River Scare, and indeed the song writing of its leader, Tim Manning, is born.

For every country twang there is a folk lick, for every new world breath there is an old world heartbeat; ancient celtic auras blend with more recent musical ideas, worlds collide, universal ideas are revisited, new stories are told, small personal narratives are threaded through bigger stories and vice versa.

It is this ability to wander these two worlds with ease that flavours the music, No Jericho being a slice of homespun folk, Restless Soul very much playing with the sounds of the American heartland and then you have songs such as But Still You Stay which is the perfect example of the cultural distances being shortened, an ocean being crossed and traditional sounds being blended.

You can count on Blind River Scare to come up with the goods, deliver a package of great songs but the clever thing is that whilst singing about what a big, exciting and sometimes scary place the world can be, the universality of the music reminds us that, in some sense at least, it really isn’t that big at all.