| Review by rannagarden October 7, 2011 (3 of 3 found this review helpful)
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Performance:  Sonics: |
Country? Bluegrass? Folk? Three good questions and the correct answer could probably be either depending on the listeners references. With my references I would say bluegrass. From tune #1 the thought jumps towards Nickel Creek (as all sacd listeners should know as excellent bluggrass!), but also a wiff of Alison K and Union Station.
The members of Sticks & Stones all met at a swedish university in 2004/2005. Playing in different constellations and bands for a couple of years yet sharing the love of acoustic music they eventually went pursuing their own careers in different parts of sweden. Later members of the band met by chance and found that they still shared the love of acoustic music. And with that in particular, bluegrass(!). From there the band members: Rebecka Sjöberg, Alexander Bergström, Erik Berggren, Emma Salomonsson and Jonas Lindberg ended up with forming a new band, getting gigs and eventually got around to Opus3 and recorded this album.
Sticks & Stones selftitled debut album has all the properties to act as a steppingstone for the group unto further greatness. During this week the record has seen some good hours in my sacd-player and it has been a delightful week to say the least. I have mentioned Nickel Creek and the references are there in the slower and softer tunes of Nickel. Don´t expect the super-energy-blugrass one might get from Nickel from Sticks & Stones. There are some uptempo tunes of course but overall S&S has a gentler approach and with Rebecka Sjöbergs soft vocals it could be some discussion if one might not find a slice of The Corrs in S&S blugrass. Listen to the tune "Silence" for example.
Being an Opus3 record you can expect Jan-Eric Persson behind the recording and mixing. Usually doing an insanely good job at capturing and mixing Opus3 and Jan-Eric is a quality mark as far a recording goes. But this time it is not quite top notch. The main remark is that on some songs you get a little bit of harsh "s"-pronunciation. I know Opus3 can do better than that.
But all-in-all the sacd community are not spoiled with bluegrass records, so this Sticks & Stones album is, as far as I am concerned, a buy or die record.
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