Tempted and Tried

Artist: Steeleye Span
Label: Shanachie
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 016351642028
EAN: 0016351642028
ASIN: B000000E2P

Release Date: 1990-02-27

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British Folk

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Listmania:

The Wonderful World of Steeleye Span
A Steeleye Halloween

Tracks:

Jack Hall
Two Butchers
Padstow
The First House In Connaught/Sailor's Bonnet
Betsy Bell And Mary Gray
Shaking Of The Sheets
Searching For Lambs
Seagull
The Cruel Mother
Following Me
The Fox

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Customer Reviews:

Late eighties reunion album.......2006-06-16

I agree that Steeleye Span's best years were the early years, when they recorded and toured regularly together, but this album has much to commend it. Recorded (it seems) to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their original formation, this is an album full of contrasts with one disappointing track. The songs are a mix of traditional and original songs. Death is a common theme - about half the songs here are about death in one form or another.

The album opens with Padstow, a bright and cheerful traditional song about the May Day festivities in that Cornish seaside resort. Next comes The fox, an interesting original song about foxhunting, taken from the perspective of a confident fox who expects to win the battles against the horses and hounds. Two butchers, a traditional song, is about two men on horseback who hear cries of distress from nearby woods. One of the men thinks it a trap but the other believes the cries are genuine. Find out what happens for yourself. Two original songs come after that - Following me (about a stalker) and Seagull (about the old game of shove-penny).

The disappointment is The cruel mother, which comes acrossas a monotonous dirge but could have been brilliant. It is about a mother who kills her new-orn baby. When the mother eventually dies, she turns up at the gates of Heaven where she meets the child that she killed. The mother doesn't recognize the child but the child recognizes the mother. Unfortunately, the verse about the killing and the verse about the mother attempting to enter Heaven are treated as one long verse while the concluding lines about the mother's punishment are scarcely audible. I assume that they were trying to dramatize the song but their efforts completely backfired. I had to study the lyrics carefully to figure out what the song was about.

After that, the quality of the album returns to normal. All the remaining songs are traditional beginning with Jack Hall, a song about a man facing execution. Another traditional song, Searching for lambs, is about a shepherd falling in love. Shaking of the sheets is about a funeral ceremony. A reels medley comes next followed by the concluding song, Betsy Bell and Mary Gray, about two Scottish women who die of the plague.

In many ways, this is a brilliant album although not quite up to the standard of their seventies music. However, I am obliged to remove one star for The cruel mother.

Not bad, but not great ,either.......2004-03-13

This is nowhere near even approaching the standard of some of their Seventies albums, but it is better than the two albums that came before it, Back in Line(1986) and Sails of Silver(1980). Whilst most of the tracks are "trad. arr.", they are mostly imbued with a sort of Eighties` pop blandness and insipidness. There`s a watered-down feel to the songs. Well, it WAS the Eighties after all. The two tracks "Betsy Bell And Mary Grey" and "Searching For Lambs" are the most tradional-sounding on the album, with Maddy Prior singing on both, and there`s also a fine violin solo on the former.

"The First House in Connaught/Sailor`s Bonnet" is a rousing fiddle-led instrumental, frequently performed at live shows.

The ludicrously cheesy "Following Me" sounds like straight Pop, which was never Steeleye`s forte. The best Steeleye Span songs have always been adaptations of traditional songs. Another of the original compositions, "The Fox", doesn`t convince either, with its Animal-Rights pretensions. I`m not an advocate of fox-hunting, but the sentiments expressed in this song seem a bit contrived, cliched and superficial to me. (Does Peter Knight REALLY care that much about the plight of foxes?) But, more importantly, it is
arguably the weakest track, in musical terms, on the album, anyway.

one of Steeleye's most accessible efforts.......2002-01-04

By the 1980s, Steeleye Span had reformed but they were not nearly as prolific as they had been during their heyday. "Tempted and Tried" was released near the dawn of the 90s and demonstrates an older, wiser Steeleye, more mellow than most of its predecessors and an album that can appeal to even the more folk-rock phobic in the audience. True, there is a price to pay for instant appeal - the hard driving quality of "Parcel of Rogues" and "All Around My Hat" is sadly missing and the whole thing comes across as slightly sanitized, but the eschewing of period effects makes the album sound fresh even today. And lest we thing that Steeleye has contented itself with nursery rhymes, under the joyful veneer of "Jack Hall" is a gory tale, and "Shaking of the Sheets" is surely about death, while the frightening "Somebody's Watching" is a triumph of mood and a statement of just how versatile this group can be. "Tempted and Tried" comes highly recommended because, as in almost all Steeleye recordings, the song selection, arrangement, playing, and sheer enthusiasm are exemplary.

3.5 stars.......1999-08-05

After the transitional "Back In Line" album, Steeleye continued on and released this, their 12th album in 1990, twenty years after their still magnificent debut "Hark The Village Wait."

The results here, while not always perfect, show the band still with the capacity to make music worth hearing.

The highlights here included "Jack Hall," "Padstow," and a pair of spooky numbers in "Betsy Bell and Mary Gray" (about two women who flee London to escape the plague) and "Shaking of the Sheets," which might remind someone of Sharon Lois and Bram, only if that trio had a sense of the deeply macabre.

"Tempted and Tired" isn't likely to be at the top of anyone's list of favorite Steeleye albums, but most Steeleye fans will want it in their collection nonetheless.

There are two good tracks on this cd..........1999-03-20

...and they are very, very good. "Betsy Bell and Mary Grey" and "Searching for lambs" are mournful and mystical. These two songs owe much of their charm to the fact that they KNOW that they are folk songs, and don't pretend to be otherwise-- little more than Maddy Prior's alto (a definite improvement over the pretty, but apparently fake, soprano that she assumed in the band's early albums) and Peter Knight's fiddle are needed to carry them off. The rest of the tracks on this album are unspeakable. The band seems determined to appeal to a broader, dumber audience than what it naturally attracts, and ends up sounding even more inane than the treacly soft-pop that makes most fans of folk-rock positively ill. "The shaking of the sheets" in particular reminded me of the Sharon Lois and Bram albums I used to love when I was about six years old. I finished the album wanting to strangle Bob Johnson (IS this the same Bob Johnson who made "Below the Salt"'s "King Henry" so memorable?)whose nauseating voice and overblown arrangements seem to be responsible for the feel of this cd.

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