The Magnolia Sisters
Album: Love's Lies
Label: Arhoolie
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.magnoliasisters.com/

For well over a decade now, this vibrant quartet, led by Louisiana luminaries Ann Savoy and Jane Vidrine, has been producing spirited, feelgood music of the old-timey cajun variety, and intermittently releasing albums too, these being of real quality and pushing at the boundaries between cajun, old-time and folk and invariably containing much interesting and worthwhile material that's not been heard elsewhere.

The Sisters' excellent 2000 album Chers Amis and, a decade later, 2010's Stripped Down, both proved particularly masterful, if quite different, collections, and their latest, Love's Lies, hardly falls at all behind these in any respect (except in its undue brevity!). It's also possibly a slightly more varied set musically speaking, its tentacles reaching far and wide across the roots spectrum. Even the well-heeled straight-cajun of Joe Falcon's En Route Chez Moi goes through the Magnolia mill and comes out raw yet sparkling, and the new collection gets into its stride at once with a lilting, (unusually) banjo-led cajun waltzer extolling the simple virtues of La Bonne Vie.

The Sisters provide a catchy western-swing groove for Est-ce Que Tu Penses Jamais À Moi?, and they take the Dewey Balfa translation of George Jones' Don't Stop The Music much in the spirit of Ron Kavana's Midnight On The Water: affectionate and respectful yet vital. The Sisters' sparsely-scored, drone-heavy account of Le Deserteur is perhaps the disc's honourable exception in what's otherwise a diet of exclusively positive songs (for a change, as the liner notes remark!), and makes a very strong impact in this company. Even so, there's exceptional degree of variety within the disc's ambit, from the lazy Caribbean vibe of Malinda to the ultra-infectious honky-tonk string-band slapped rhythms of Les Clos De Coton (a variant of Cotton Fields).

I can't resist turning the spotlight too on the glorious twin-fiddle work from Ann and Anya (Burgess) on half of the tracks (notably the haunting La Valse De Grand Bois, which was learnt from Lisa Trahan's ancestor Bixy Guidry), and the unerring way that Ann and Jane's voices blend together in chillingly percipient harmony both on the upbeat numbers and the more intense selections. And then, a standout cut, Par Derrìère Chez Mon Père, is done in brilliant four-part a cappella, before eventually, the Sisters close the barroom doors on us for the night with a barely controlled electric-ragtime shuffle on Ann's self-penned number Hot Stuff (rocking out with plentiful touches of blues and zydeco along the way). And I've barely had time to mention the multi-instrumental versatility of the band's founder-members, with Ann and Jane constantly switching betwixt fiddle, banjolin, accordion and guitar. These gals is real good, and this is a superb set that fair begs use of the replay button straightaway: toujours l'encore!

David Kidman