FOLKJOKEOPUS

With a few more epics added to his canon, ROY HARPER augments his fascinating lyrical style fixated on the present moment on "Folkjokeopus". Here he wisely avoids the challenges of mixing spoken with sung; though one could argue he doesn't sing per se, I disagree as I feel he, unlike a few of his better known contemporaries. is aware of his vocal limitations and plays up his strengths, such as emotion and urgency. One can forgive a lot of shortcomings when entranced by performance, and while this is easier in the live setting, hats off to Roy Harper for succeeding even in the cloud, and particularly on this album relative to its predecessors.

The highlights here are concentrated in the epics, especially the heartfelt "She's the One" and the 18 minute opus "McGoohan's Blues", which is one of the few vocal heavy epics that can run 18 minutes and avoid hanging around too long. Both tracks are sung in breathless but not hopeless desperation, the kind of performance you get when a task is challenging but you believe you can achieve it, perhaps a case where the expiring studio time proved a boon, though I'm not a fan of his falsetto. I also enjoy the opener "Sgt Sunshine" with its unusual meter that seems to have inspired SPRING's sole album, and the nearly instrumental "One for All" which almost makes me take back my assertion that Harper's picking work cannot quite rival the contemporary folk masters.

Unfortunately, "One for All" does hint at the weakness of "Folkjokeopus" as being out of balance, with a few true throwaways that pander to trends of a year or two earlier, like sitars and DONOVAN ( "In the Time of Water") and whistles and silly psychedelia (not to mention that icky falsetto) and INCREDIBLE STRING BAND ("Composer of Life"). While I have grown to tolerate and sometimes outright enjoy his music hall numbers ("Exercising Self Control", "Manana"), he offers a homophobic remark in each, one of which could just be a statement of preference and the other which sounds like he is rethinking the preference! Google could not even ferret out a reddit thread dedicated to these tendencies but I will be vigilant in the coming albums. Of those two tracks, I much prefer "Exercising Self Control".

I get the sense that this might be the gateway album to Harper's illustrious under the radar career in terms of the beginnings of his folk prog ramblings, and I wouldn't be joking to state it's my favorite of his thus far, but at the moment I can't quite award that elusive extra star.

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