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The Bill Hilly Band - All Day Every Day
The Bill Hilly Band is a Victoria band that I happily discovered this year at the Canmore Folk Festival. I’m not really sure how to describe their style because they seem to play a lot of different styles. On this CD they have sort of a mix of bluegrass and klezmer. Not both styles together on the same song, just some songs in each style.
I think this is one of my favorite new albums of the year. There are like 2 songs on it that I kind of don’t like, and 12 songs that I really do like. My initial favorites were “Francis”, a song about a famous Victoria architect, and “Covered Front Porch”, about working hard when you’re young so you can relax when you’re old, but others are quickly growing on me. These include “Moonshiner”, quite a slow version of “I’ve been a moonshiner for many’s the year / And I spent all me money on whisky and beer”; and, yes, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm (After they’ve seen Paree)”.
That’s right. These guys have a whole bunch of different influences and aren’t afraid to play stuff that’s a little offbeat. One of their other tracks is an arrangement of part of a Shostakovich piano concerto for 5-piece bluegrass band. It works. It really does.
This is an amazing CD, and if you like banjo and accordion music, I highly highly recommend it. If you don’t like banjo and accordion music, what the heck’s wrong with you?!
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