Review: Dandelion Wine - Pickpocket

Dandelion Wine are an interesting band. While one half of this bohemian duo plays an assortment of exotic middle age period instruments namely the Appalachian dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, lute and bowed psaltery the other female member processes beats and electronic loops. It gets even better because they play middle age folk melodies while backed by kickin drum beats and vocals. If you’re at all like me this information would be enough to send you rushing out to hear this band without delay. So with very high expectations did I await their set at the Bar Open last week.

Pickpocket were the band who opened the nights show and were another male/female pairing. The difference in this case though was that the male was completely superfluous to the band. The girl member sang and played the acoustic in the expected manner. She was actually pretty good. The guy pretty much just followed the acoustic guitar on the electric and didn’t add particularly to the music. Still not a bad set from a nice band.

When Dandelion Wine had finished assembling their large array of instruments they opened the show (I think) with a small tribute to Syd Barrett by incorporating the theme to Interstellar Overdrive into their introductory bowed psaltery passage. Their music was at times very good, their would be the random electronic beats, peculiar sounds from whatever random instrument and the female vocals but at other times though with application of this same formula it was pretty mundane. Dandelion Wine are an unusual case in that the idea of their band is better than its actual application, this is not to say that they’re not really good it’s just that I had hyped them up way too much in my head before actually hearing what they would be like.

They’re playing a more rock orientated set at the Public Bar in a week or so and I recommend taking a trip down to see them. Walking back from the pub that night I was waylaid at the Old Bar by the enticing thought of being able to quoff a few more beers. Upon entry I found the Bakelite Age finishing off their set. I had seen the Bakelite Age about a year ago at the Corner and back then we were nice, clean cut kids singing rock songs about physics and wine and they sort of... sucked. Now they have been transformed (as if from Ovid) into a straight up dirty, fucking rock and roll band. And though I don’t typically like these kinds of bands I was completely blown away. You should go see them and see if I was right or rather just drunk.