CAPERCAILLIE: “Capercaillie” (BMG)

YOU’RE A highly successful folk/traditional group and you take to “reworking” some of your old material in the company of Soul II Soul’s writer and keyboard programmer, Will Mowat. What does that signal? Either an impending identity crisis or a pandering to the masses, I reckon. And Capercaillie are surely beyond both?

Just when you thought it was safe to return to the faithful for a rejuvenating shot of canny instrumentals and rich, textured folk melodies, the faithful give all of that the thumbs down. Soporific arrangements where everything drowns in a sea of overproduction rules the Capercaillie camp these days and even they seem unlikely to emerge from its trance even for a few bawdy bars every now and again.

The opener, ‘The Miracle Of Being’, augurs poorly for the entire album, a watery mish mash of flute and trudging percussion that scatters whatever life there might have been in too many directions to allow for any fruitful progeny to emerge. Even its curtain-raiser lyrics, “Welcome Mother Nature” place it uneasily amid the World Music arena where a nod of a flute alongside a wink of a synthesiser is as good as a rhyming couplet to a deaf man. (Such mixed metaphors sit well on their confused shoulders these days.)

The twinned versions of ‘When You Return (Delirium)’ in English and Scots Gaelic sound curiously like a pairing of David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto – on an off day. Synths reverberate ad nauseum, percussion dredges past the eardrums with Vangelis-like deep and meaningless certainty and clashes with the feathery vocals nonchalantly.

Only on ‘Take The Floor’ do the finer qualities of the musicians finally peer through the layers of production, and then only barely long enough for Marc Duff’s superbly animated whistles to take flight.

Elevator musak. Is this what Capercaillie are content with? Hardly the stuff of active imaginations. Maybe it’s just a respite. Fingers crossed they’ll recover soon.

• Siobhán Long