So you are a fledgling Icelandic label (come on, play along), three wonderful, progressive albums under your furry belt – one from the classical ingenue, one from the abrasive guitar-cruncher, and one from the knob-twiddling producer to the stars.  So, what are you going to do next?  Isn’t it obvious?  You haven’t done a folk album yet, have you?  Get yourself a banjo player and immerse him in the hot spring of talent bursting from your roster.

Sam Amidon’s All Is Well takes a trove of trad arrs, with contents reaching back to, and beyond, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and rubs it till it gleams.  Over Amidon’s pure, languid croon and fingerpicking, Nico Muhly adds some sensitive arrangements – the tracks are not quite wrenched from their place in history, but more given a couple of sedatives and wheeled - slowly enough so as not to wake them - into the present day.  It appears that the bluegrass standard “Oh Death” still hasn’t learned that the grim reaper ain’t gonna stand for no cheap attempts at bribery (He’s death!  What is he going to do with your money?  Buy a nice semi in Croydon?  Take it down Stringfellows and stuff it in some lapdancer’s knickers?).  However he may be tempted to sit awhile and admire the cushion of violins that underwrite that ham-fisted bung; thank Muhly for buying some time with his pristine work  “Little Johnny Brown” is the best thing on here, worked up into a incantatory stomp with some thick bass and sawed strings.  However, without Dock Boggs’ ragged howl, “Sugar Baby” is somewhat emasculated; transformed into a pretty thing that could have sat next to the more reflective and wistful moments on the last Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record (which was, of course, also produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson). 

All Is Well is a fine addition to the Bedroom Community canon, and in a sense, it fits right into the Chinese whisper tradition of this canon of song, passed as they are from hand to hand, acquiring new character and characters as they go.  But the talented Sam Amidon has taken them into a strange land that I’m not sure many of the ghosts who inhabit these words would understand, let alone choose to follow them into.

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