THE JOHN RENBOURN GROUP: THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

The Enchanted Garden, at least in my mind, is a less joyous album than its predecessor A Maid In Bedlam for a number of reasons. First off, it is without the fiddle playing of John's former girlfriend Sue Draham, with multi instrumentalist John Molineux taking her place. Secondly, the album was recorded after an exhausting tour of the UK, Europe and the States. The latter country having produced the excellent live album Live In America. The third reason was the eschewing of the fun traditional sing along folk songs found on their first album. Renbourn returns to his love of early English and Renaissance music which is instrumental and quite staid in comparison to the past fun sing along narratives. Jacqui McShee returns in a more solo singing role, especially in her a capella reading the trad. song "A Bold Young Farmer" and the Pentangle like "The Planes Of Waterloo" and "The Maid On The Shore" , with support from the rest of the group. All three songs would have fit perfectly on Pentangle's The Cruel Sister album and are of the same quality.

Renbourn's near guitar tutorials of ancient Pavane instrumentalss, which lead off the album, would have fit perfectly on his Lady And The Unicorn album from the mid seventies. Again, being of the same quality. This gives the album a sense of being neither fish nor foul, despite the quality, and leads one to want to focus on only one genre and go back to past albums to explore that genre more deeply. Only the semi improvisational instrumental "Sidi Brahim" puts one in mind of the Renbourn Group's first album, but by then it's too late as the spell has long been broken. 3 stars.