On "Hung, Drawn & Quartered" British duo Bitter Ruin cut folk music down to its bare essentials;
each of the seven songs found here is built on little more than one guitar and a vocal track or two.
And the mood presented is uniformly dark, noir if you will.
So it's no mean feat for them to keep the listener's interest piqued through-out this colleciton, yet that they do.
Perhaps it's because they build their work on a solid, tradional (almost medieval) approach to song structure. This is dark cabaret music by way of troubadour mysticism.
Despite this variety of old timey-ness these pieces are distinctly modern and accessible, nothing on "Hung, Drawn & Quartered" sounds dated or dusty. Shadowed, but not antiquely patinated.
Similarly here's such a clarity to the vocals that the band never descends into heavy-handed spookiness. These aren't ghost stories, they're personal, living, tales.
Intimate yes, claustrophobic no.
