Greenwich Meantime

continued

pop," but even more than these three genres are involved. These musicians seek to use the Celtic past in a modern, eclectic context without recourse to sentimentality, and their appeal lies partly in the variety of styles into which they can incorporate a Celtic element and have it mean something while it's there.

Many of the songs on Greenwich Meantime's eponymously titled debut album share a common two-strain structure: one section, vocal or instrumental, draws on some genre external to Celtic music, and the second tune is an answer, traditional in shape and played on the fiddle or Highland bagpipes. All of these songs take a little step as they move between the two parts, and in a couple of cases it's more of a lurch — "Living Easy" deploys Quebec-born Shelley Downing's fiddle in a rhythmic counterpoint to a Miles Davis-style jazz version of "Summertime," complete with trumpet, and "420" (the term is one of the most recent in the long parade of code words that have been used to refer to cannabis) alternates between fiddle and electric-guitar psychedelia.