THE JOHN LANGAN BAND
Bones of Contention
The John Langan Band

www.thejohnlanganband.com
 

For an acoustic three-piece, the John Langan Band manage to make a rock group’s worth of noise. There’s guitar/percussion, fiddle and double bass (and flute thrown in somewhere), with plenty of fleet, fluent playing ranging from the roaring to the quite sublime. They can filter in plenty of madness (listen to the end of “Charlie’s Rant,” for instance, or parts of the wonderfully-titled “Midgets On Acid,” an imaginative reworking on John Kirkpatrick’s “Jumping At The Sun, which well have been interpreted on drugs, or even the first half of “D-mented,” which grunts and groans like a monster in pain before resolving into a finger-busting exercise that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old prog band). Yes, they can do wild, but they can also do delicate. Witness the beauty in “Winter Song,” or the aching way the instruments come together at times. For all that, as a project this is a set of pieces that shift through mood and tempo with very little connection. That might be fine for live performances, but it’s far less effective on disc where it’s harder to simply carry the audience along. Considering that only two of the tracks clock in at less than five minutes, and there are periods where the words ‘self indulgence’ are writ large, I think that more tracks of shorter duration would have been a better idea. (To put it another way, they needed a stern producer.) That said, it’s impossible to fault the musicianship, which swings with ease from the Balkans to Scotland and places only accessible via psychedelics. What they probably need is to look at themselves and differentiate between what works for the performance vs. recording. God knows, there’s potential aplenty here, and no shortage of enthusiasm. Next time out, and I’m sure there will be a second disc for them, they just need more focus and maybe some objective ears. Could well go places.

— Chris Nickson