The End Times Spasm Band "High Wire Lover"

Chain Smoking Records, 2011

I can hear your kazoos...but that ain't the news

• The End Times Spasm Band can be classified as part of a loosely defined revival movement in early 20th century jazz; if it has a name yet then I haven't heard it - perhaps Nu-Trad is an appropriate label.

• This sits them alongside bands and artists such as The Carolina Chocolate Drops (who gleefully dig even further back into minstrel repertoire) , Pokey Lafarge, C.W. Stoneking, The Wiyos and an ever growing number of others. On the one hand this is something which should be applauded - the vibrant sounds of Dixieland Jazz would inform Country Swing, New Orleans jazz crossed with the blues would lead us to a swampy form of early rock, and onto artists such as Dr John. These are primal roots, which we ignore at our own loss, or abandon to tired recreations which just let the music ossify into irrelevance. You might dig Kid Ory, but someone playing his music at fifth hand? Is that still cool? Does it still matter?

  The most successful Nu-Trad artists - the Pokey Lafarges and C.W. Stonekings - bring that extra something to their love of the music. They portray a larger than life character - Pokey comes across as some kind of ego-driven chancer; Stoneking is "the world's greatest liar". What, then, do The End Times Spasm Band bring to the Nu-Trad scene with their new release?

  Across a dozen tracks they do produce upbeat jazz, but like a half cooked pancake nothing sticks to the wall. Whether it's a love song either happy or sad, an ode to the joys of black coffee, grief, despair or the heights of pleasure everything blends together into one long whole.   It's a pleasant enough sound, you could hum along, but it's background music. On many of the songs Bart Helms gets to demonstrate his jazz guitar prowess, and it's sweet and it's smooth, but it isn't red hot.   On top of this there are a couple of upright bass solos. There's a reason why the upright bass doesn't feature as highly as the trumpet, the trombone or the clarinet in the classic recordings of the first Jazz age.   There's a reason why Ragtime is more noted for the piano than for the upright bass. And it's probably one of those things that works great live - with the rest of the band deferring to the bass player, and whooping up the hot licks. However, like the stage antics that singer Lindsey Rae Patterson almost certainly gets up to - and I can easily imagine her careening around a stage or daringly doing the black bottom - it's not something you can see on a recording.

  This is not unique to The End Times Spasm Band - The Wiyos suffer from the same problem; entertaining stage shtick that doesn't fully transfer to a non-visual medium. There's nothing really wrong with this album, the music is fine, the singing is fine, it just fails to excite.