Released this month, Barbara Cassidy Band serve up a tasteful eight song post card with A Winter Frame Of Mind. Heading toward the cold season, this collection is arriving right on time. With a knack for nailing down traditional folk and Celtic idioms, Cassidy and her friends have come up with a dandy to return to time and again until about March.
Opening track Calico Skies finds Cassidy in her usual high pitched vocal form. Her voice is sharply clear and emotively warm. Singing of her committed love for another, Cassidy sets the scene by referring to the sky above for separate vignettes. Her smooth, traveling vocal line contrasts beautifully with Eric Chasalow’s festive acoustic chords. Her voice also finds a good home amidst his penny and low whistles.
Murphy‘s “The Hills Of South Armagh” gives Cassidy a chance to showcase how she can sing with a tight sweetness. Her voice comes in several small spoonfuls without too much bending and sustaining. She makes each line shine with mainly the easeful glide of her voice as she moves from verse to verse.
A snappy, folksy song, “His Bright Smile Haunts Me” travels along a mandolin laced and moody violin path, suggesting a slight Celtic feel. Cassidy’s high, pretty voice moves alongside that violin like a slow dance partner and over those crispy mandolin notes. That mix of partnership and contrast alights this dandy with a tender feeling that haunts this song in the best possible way.
A nativity theme runs through the traditional Irish tune “Wexford Carol.,” which originated out of County Wexford centuries ago. In this hearkening back to an older time of holiday celebration, Cassidy milks the timely sounds for all their worth. She truly carols as she takes her time sprinkling her voice out in measured amounts over an epic start-stop guitars, mandolin, and drone. The older songs always feel more Christmas than modern ones, and this song is no exception. There is true awe and admiration here.
“A Drinking Song” wafts in pleasantly on the strength of Chasalow’s penny whistle. Jimmy Ryan’s mandolin and Joe Kessler’s violin also adorn this tune with shiny flinty notes as well as an emotive bob and weave. Cassidy meets the challenge of fitting her high, shiny voice to these generous trappings of talents. Her voice seems to rise from a high place, moving higher to a loftier realm.
“All I Know” gets it warmth from Chasalow’s organ and Travis Alford’s trumpet. Those two puffs of sound provide a pillow for Cassidy’s more resting voice. She hovers, briefly, here and there, throughout her vocal melody. Her presence in this song is its strongest point, a beacon that shines with a message of love that is this song.
Mother-daughter songs require a lot of lift to express the importance of such relationships. On “I Have A Daughter,“ Cassidy’s voice reaches golden heights. In both expression and musical finesse, one can feel the depth, breadth, and width of not only what she feels for her daughter but also why. That relationship and the lyrics and vocal oomph that express it stand out like a bonfire in a dark night. Chasalow’s guitar and mandolin, too, scale great heights here, leaving one feeling impressed, entertained, and quite moved.
Cassidy closes out with the traditional “Auld Lang Syne.” So much is accomplished here with merely Cassidy’s voice and Chasalow’s acoustic guitars. Cassidy digs out the roots feeling in this song, a meditation on relationships and the myriad of feelings that come from contemplating theme.
Barbara Cassidy Band have done it again. Cassidy and her gang of friends have married her high beauty of a voice to beautiful natural acoustic instruments. A Winter Frame Of Mind continuously offers up gems of voice and instrument and the emotive content pressed out of voice and instruments reaches the listener on a deeply personal level. Also on the mission are backing singer Becky Khitrik, Bodhran player Kyle Forsthoff, Hanneke Cassel on Violin, and bass player Robert Mieske. Recorded at Cassidy and Chasalow’s home studio and at WGBH Fraser studio with engineering by Antonio Oliart, recording by Yann Falquet, and mixing and mastering by Dan Cardinal at Dimension Sound, A Winter Frame Of Mind rings out with many pure, natural sounds.
