Album: The Acoustic Folk Box

Various Artists, Topic

The impulses driving traditional folk music – as depicted on this four-CD set tracking the British Isles folk revival, from the Aran-sweatered Sixties of Ewan MacColl and the Dubliners, through to the pierced, flame-haired Nineties of Eliza Carthy – are directly opposed to the amorphous globalism of Moby, placing a premium instead on particularity of experience and location, location, location. The accompanying track annotations feature notes on not just the performers' roots but those of the song, too, a celebration of regionality that goes way beyond outsized national blocs, and in some cases is directly opposed to them: many of the characters in these songs are suffering through opposition to the status quo, or cheekily thwarting it – a sort of topical samizdat entertainment that found its logical offspring in the workers' rights ballads and CND anthems of the Aldermaston generation. The set's chronological presentation may seem strange for a genre whose aim is, in part, to defy the passage of time, rejecting modernity in favour of antiquity; but mercifully, the "authenticity" prized by purists has always been tempered by the urge to cross-pollinate, with such 1960s pioneers as Pentangle and the Incredible String Band inventing the kind of world/folk crossovers that have since proliferated, a progress that this compilation touches upon. And it's not all shepherds, squires and fair maidens, either.