The season of the stew is now upon us and like a good stew, an album like “Health & Safety” by Scottish hybrid folk funksters Man’s Ruin has quality ingredients slowly simmered until thoroughly cooked and thus able to warm you from the inside out.
Certainly, the opening songs - “Frantic Funk” and “Days of the Week” – suggest a musical direction towards the upmarket, post ceilidh, dancefloor. There is, however, more than food for the feet here and “Time” shows both intelligence and subtlety while “Living For The Day” would surely win the approval of a cultural chin scratcher like Sting. Overall though, the most notable aspect of this album is just how good the performances are with Calum MacCrimmon, Hamish Napier, Innes Watson, James Lindsay and Scott Donald rattling through these songs like jaunty young men hot on the trail of the Average White Band.
I suppose that’s the important thing here. Man’s Ruin show a musical maturity that pulls them ahead of the average Glasgow band and , similarly, they outpace the parochial limitations of so many of the folk musicians of dear old Scotland. It’s like somebody finally sneaked some decent drugs into that ceilidh you always seem to get trapped in when you hang about with the better class of people.