The Monks Kitchen - The Wind May Howl
According to this press release, last year the Monks Kitchen played 'storming' live shows at the Hay-on-Wye book festival and the Lounge on the farm in Canterbury. If they blew the doors off the place at either they probably felt guilty about it and paid for the damage. Their game is subtly and nuance, like the polite revolution of Simon and Garfunkel.
Obviously, it's not as good. The Monks Kitchen's quiet riot is a lot more intimate and less ambitious. It won't bring the troops home from Iraq, kick Lyndon Johnson out of office or ever sound good in a stadium. These six songs have a marvellous sense of nearness to them, as if the band were playing in your living room which, playing in Canterbury Church, they practically were.
The best song is the title one, where the band have about as much attitude as playing with a double-bass, soft percussion and finger-picked folk guitars will allow. It narrowly beats the first song 'Head For The Hills', which does the same. You almost want rid of the anachronistic TV and couches from your living room so that you can sit on the floor and drink mead with them.
The Monks Kitchen aren't so good because they're inviting. 'The Wind May Howl' is diverse. The second half is slower and its atmosphere threateningly brooding - it's not surprising FilmFour used the instrumental 'Snake Charmer' on a trailer of Robert De Niro's films. They're so good because of this variety.
Everyone should find something to like and give in to its quiet determination to entertain you. There's a certain kind of folk that sounds like it was recorded five hundred years ago but the Monks Kitchen put into each song what most bands struggle to put into an album and I hope this short one is a harbinger of more to come.
Buy this album. It's only twenty minutes long so you'll need to get tickets to wherever they're playing near you as well. If you're lucky it will be somewhere small enough to imagine it's you they're playing to. Not that that needs much imagination.