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Review: 'LUCKY STRIKES, THE'
'The Motion And the Moving On'   

-  Label: 'Harbour song Records'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '30th September 2016'-  Catalogue No: 'HSR015'

Our Rating:
Yes, Sarfend's finest country folk band The Lucky Strikes are back with their fifth album and that is a very good thing indeed as the album is on trend with the current crop of albums with watercolour paintings for covers.

The album opens with the cool and slightly sad Homesick: a good look at how you miss home while working hard away from home. To Be An Actor has a good rolling feel to it like they are taking you on a road trip with them as it builds up and dies away again as MG Boulter imagines what it would be like to be an actor. A cool song.

Lilac And Soil seems to have 2 intros: a frantic build up and then a quiet acoustic one before the song itself which is quiet and acoustic. It sounds a lot like MG Boulter's solo material until the organ starts to adorn the vocals and guitar and it's a lovely lovelorn-sounding piece.

Ballad Of The Silver Chain opens like an old Waterboys song and seems to be about the old wild east of Essex and the gamblers and hustlers around the Kursaal. It also has a brilliant line about being in the grand hotel drinking pesticide when the gypsies come in. It needs to be heard a few times to get all the lyrics.

Michael is a song of regret for an old friend on the missing list and stands out for me as the one song that jumps out every time I've heard the album. I wonder what's eating Michael as this isn't clear but let's hope he gets the help he needs or hears this song and asks for assistance.

Pollution Blues is the band at their quietest and most contemplative; hushed and barely there and wanting to be heard at 3 in the morning. War Drums brings things back up with the full on band: a song about the hardships of being on the road and not earning enough to really get by among other things.

Carry Me Lord is an agrarian gospel song in the plain song tradition hoping for a good harvest from the soil. Hearts Will No Longer Be Coals is a wistful piano-led song about being broke again and hoping to find enough for a bed for the night.

Mother Moore sounds like she is there to look after the band. The tune sounds like they have totally reworked The Devil Goes Down to Georgia through a prism of The Waterboys and early Jethro Tull and somehow it all works together really well.

The album closes with the doleful Gone Gone about a friend who is, well, gone. Not sure if he's dead or just left to find greener pastures, but either way it's a sad song to close with.

Find out more at The Lucky Strikes online
  author: simonovitch

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LUCKY STRIKES, THE - The Motion And the Moving On