When crafting a work that could be identified as chamber folk or late ’60s/early ’70s style baroque pop, you tread a fine line between pretension and technical mastery. Sheffield, UK collective and James Yorkston collaborators The Big Eyes Family Players have very successfully written soaring yet intimate orchestral post-rock, with flavors of Fairport style Anglo-folk, that’s wholly warm and inviting. No abstract attitudes, no wanky guitar noodling… The Big Eyes Family Players are cinematic sans any speck of pretense. Imagine Set Fire To Flames if they spent more time in the forrest foraging for wood, or Six Organs of Admittance if Chasney was more in tune with old western Europe than British India (though raga sounds do present themselves in “The Chattering Lady”). Their new release, Family Favourites, is a collection of reworked old Big Eyes canticles (the first incarnation) alongside new material and covers. The digital and vinyl compilation reworks and rerecords their vintage instrumental torch ballads with their most recent players, essentially closing one chapter to open a new one. Consider it a sort of a retrospective, with a new veneer… fitting since these guys have been around for over a decade, largely under the radar. There’s no better introduction than this one. Recommended for fans of  Alasdair Roberts, John Fahey, Rachel’s, Josephine Foster, and Sir Richard Bisop. Grip the binary and/or analog from Karate Body.

MP3 :::
The Big Eyes Family Players – Jack