Rigs of The Time: The Best of Martin Carthy

Excellent overview of his music. Perhaps a little too much of swarbrick. Still worth getting

Martin Carthy as his very best.

Martin Carthy is a fantastic musician, and this comes across strongly in 'Rigs of the Times'. The 19 tracks are taken from nine albums throughout his career (which is getting on for an astounding forty years), ranging the gamut from solo, with fiddle player Dave Swarbrick or the band Brass Monkey, and so it'd be easy to think that this album would be too disparate to fit together as an enjoyable whole. Not so. Carthy's straightforward yet unique vocal style binds the whole thing together, and doesn't seem to have changed much throughout the period this collection covers. His singing is clear, with only a little bit of vibrato to ornament it, and clearly enunciated, all the better to make the lyrics come across loud and true.Most of the songs on this album are traditional folk ones, and although (as with jazz standards) there is quite a degree of leeway in how to play them, which Carthy uses well, the sense of history and grassroots English culture still shines through. Even on his original tracks, 'A Question of Sport' and 'Rigs of the Time', there's still a timeless feel to the songs and their lyrics - even though they may be dealing with contemporary issues this is done as part of a long tradition of folk protest music, and they haven't dated badly at all. Indeed, 'Rigs of the Time' is one of the standout tracks on an album of a uniformly high quality.The recording studios have let the music speak for itself and mastered this CD to have a very natural sound - anything else doesn't really fit folk music, although some try. I can say from experience that Carthy and Swarbrick performing live sound very much the same, which is of course what a recording was first supposed to do; just capture the live experience. The sleeve notes are also nicely informative, providing a complete discography of Carthy's releases and a potted biography, very useful for those unfamiliar with this musician. Buy this CD, decide which songs are your favourite and then buy the albums those are on. Strongly recommended.