Album Review: Moonfire by Boy & Bear

If there’s one thing folk music needs, it’s authenticity. Take Woody Guthrie – he was perfectly placed to sing stories about the troubled times he lived in, because by sitting in the midst of the Dust Bowl he was able to see first-hand how the Great Depression ravaged his country. His account of America in the Thirties is genuine, and that’s part of what makes it definitive folk music.

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We’ve enough guitar-toting faux-folk troupes in Britain already without Australia sending us theirs too. As with much of the current middle-class boho milieu foot-stomping its way to prominence with relentlessly chipper vim, [a]Boy & Bear[/a] know their way round a melody and a chorus; yet their rootsy rattle’n’roll fails to connect with anything more grabbing than a vague lyrical nostalgia. Songs like ‘Feeding Line’ and ‘My Only One’ are delivered with the earnest passion of nothing at all, while ‘Golden Jubilee’ is a heavily buffed hoe-down for the trust-fund masses.

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