Before you get down to really digging into the exquisite sound that Henhouse Prowlers makes, you realise that their music, in more general terms, is great at reminding us about the connectivity of roots music. In their bluegrass creations, you can hear the echoes of Texas cowboy bands and Spanish guitarists, English folk traditions, and Eastern European gypsy jigs, contemporary acoustic players, and centuries-old troubadours. Like language and art, music is one of those threads that you can follow back down through the years and trace the movement of people across the world, for wherever people go, they take their music with them.
Okay, enough of the musicology lesson; most people will just want to listen to the music the Prowlers make, and as always, Unravel is an album full of rewarding and revelatory songs.
“Look Up to the Sky” is the perfect introduction, for those new here, to the band’s music, a deft and delicate blend of banjos and guitars, mandolins and basses, all used to create rhythm and melody, beat and momentum, with all four band members contributing to a richness of vocals.
“Line the Avenues” is a powerful and poignant musing on the real price paid when politicians decide to send a country’s people to war, “Three Seasons” is a gloriously infectious and dexterously woven blend of bluegrass groove and folk finesse, and “Poor Boy Like Me” is a celebration of unexpectedly finding yourself with someone you always deemed out of your league.
There’s even room for a brilliant take on Genesis’s “Land of Confusion,” and as I always say, if you are going to cover a well-known, well-loved song, you need to bring something new to the table – and boy, do they ever!
I listen to a lot of music that falls into the broad roots category, and by and large, most of it these days is made by people merely strumming their stringed instruments. Here, we have a quartet that knows how to pick and pluck and solo and serenade and make their instruments sing and mesh and merge and mix and meld together in the way that the gods of music intended, four lead players who understand how to serve the song.
A talented band with four exquisite musicians and one great album.
