The Mulligan Brothers
Album: Via Portland
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.themulliganbrothers.com

Hailing from Mobile, Alabama and fronted by chief songwriter Ross Newell none of the four members are actually brothers (at least not to each other), but there's a definite close bond to the harmonies and playing that characterise the echoes of early 70s folk-flavoured singer-songwriter rock that resound through their music.

Those harmonies are spotlighted from the outset with the a capella introduction to Wait For Me, an acoustic 'ramblin' heart' ballad that, augmented by Gram Rea's violin, suggests a Laurel Canyon meld of Jackson Browne, CS&N and James Taylor. Browne's there's too on the uptempo, violin led I Don't Want To Know and the Cajun-fiddle tinted Louise, but perhaps the most striking comparison can be found on the second track, City Full Of Streets, which, in terms of Newell's warm vocal and phrasing as well as the melody and lyrics ("she loved me like a dollar bill") is pure Paul Simon circa Rhymin' Simon/Still Crazy.

His influence can be heard throughout, on the jaunty three-part harmony slip sliding Bad Idea, the bluesy later period feel of the swampy Let Them Ring, the acoustic simplicity of Run On Ahead (the vocal taken from the demo version to preserve the cracked emotion) and the tour-weary Road That Leads Me Home and the album's narrative centerpiece, Calamine, a cinematic tale of violence and a man with an itchy trigger finger, the sparse guitar framework subtly hung with cymbals, shakers and (rather ironically given his past comments about Simon) producer Steve Berlin on piano.

Not that the quartert are slaves to their influences, they may evoke comparisons but their music and words stand firmly on their own feet, something patently evident as Rea's mandolin adds bluegrass sparkle to So Are You's soulful story of Katie and her search for a place to be herself with the terrific line about how "she was born there as a hammer, now she lives here as a nail" and the laid-back waltzing closer Not Always What It Seems with its fractured downbeat vision of love and mankind as Newell sings "love is blind from the beatings, it's kind out of fear…it's quiet because we have taken its voice, it's patient because we don't give it a choice.'

The band name apparently comes from a golfing term for a second chance, to extend the analogy this album is most definitely par for the course.

Mike Davies