Over the Hills and Further Away: review
Over the Mountains: an album for children by Ceilidh-Jo Rowe and Matthias Weston
If your children aren’t already completely succoured and suckered by the colder excesses of pop culture, here is a children’s album to give them that will help inoculate against full-scale descent into the shallows of this attention deficit century.
Over the Mountains never patronises for a moment, yet still manages to accommodate enjoyable action-based songs such as 'My Hat', which won’t make any sense unless you read the songbook, alongside exquisite evocations of nature and songs that should appeal to anyone with an ear for a catchy tune and a taste for freedom; songs like 'The Green Tree', 'Come Little Senerin', 'Working on the Railway' and 'Freedom Train'.
Ceilidh-Jo Rowe’s approach to singing folk music is wide-eyed and clear-voiced and is complemented beautifully by the guitar of Matthias Weston. There are songs here that will get your children moving, bits of songs that are easy for them to play on the piano themselves and songs that will possibly last them a lifetime - 'Wind in the Trees', for example, is an apparently simple round made hypnotically lovely by the multi-layering of Ceilidh-Jo’s voice. It builds into one of the most hauntingly joyful songs I have heard in many years.
Over the Mountains is a wonderful album, possibly even better than their first for children, A Land Very Close. Buy it for your children, or for yourselves. The less self-conscious amongst you - those adults whose inner child dances closest to the surface - will have a wonderful time dancing along in their front rooms – and for those of you who who can’t cope with that, well... you can always make an iPod playlist for the songs that don’t require actions!
A version of this review was published in today's Stroud News and Journal. To see the original, click here.
