Concrete Prairie [CD]

To be a great band you need memorable songs, fine musicianship, and a clear idea of what you are doing and Concrete Prairie tick all those boxes with a vengeance. They've been described as 'bruised Americana', and they make use of fiddle, banjo and twanging guitar solos, but this is a distinctively English brand of Americana - in which they tackle anything from London knife crime to the depression of living in a dreary English seaside town in winter. Lead singer and writer Joe describes the band as "socially conscious, aware of the world around us, and not afraid to go down a Country-Folk avenue&or to rock out". His subject matter reflects his own, often pained experiences growing up in a single-parent family, with his mother losing her life to alcoholism "so I'm acutely aware of how fragile the whole thing is&and then embracing it from there". So the sturdy Bury My Blues, which deals with mental health issues, starts as an acoustic ballad before developing into a stomping, fiddle-backed celebration of life. Wine On My Mind is influenced by the problems that faced his mother, and all other addicts "and just jumping into their shoes for a song. Thinking about how it must feel for them". And that, says bandmate Adam, is a key part of his technique "because it's easy to write a song about the devastating impact of these sort of things, but it's a lot harder to take another person's point of view, taking it from their side and how they must be feeling". Adam-penned Winter Town fits the mood perfectly with its atmospheric story of an out-of-season English resort, depression and suicide., Picking Up Pieces I Wish You Well Bury My Blues Hard Times Day By Day People Forget Time to Kill Wine On My Mind Winter Town The Devil Dealt The Deck

• Format Detail: CD
• Format: CD
• Genre: Rock