Bourdon

Bourdon is French for ‘Bumblebee,’ and Topette!!’s exhilarating and intriguing new album begins with the buzz of a dumbledore. This soon merges with Julien Cartonnet’s cornemuse – bourdon being also the French word for the drone of a bagpipe – before Andy Cutting’s diatonic button accordion follows the bee’s melodic meandering, and the band takes off, with acoustic bass guitar player Barn Stradling’s composition, ‘Just Heavy’. That’s an appropriate title, as bumblebees’ wings, according to orthodox aerodynamics, are too small to lift their bodies.

This encapsulates the wit, joy and eccentricity of Topette!!, essentially a five-piece, Anglo-French super ceilidh band. Cutting, Cartonnet, Stradling, Tania Buisse (bodhrán) and fiddle player James Delarre – each is a distinguished and highly individual player. In contrast to his expansive piping Cartonnet is a banjo player of some intricacy. Cutting wrests interesting chordal harmonies from his squeezebox, but in ‘Le Sac de Jambon’ he matches the banjo with note-for-note precision. Or does the banjo perhaps match the box – hard to tell. There are tunes (no songs) by Frédéric Paris and Bernard Blanc, accordion and bagpipe masters, a Cotswold Morris tune, French traditional tunes and one from Sweden, because this is an album made, as the CD cover asserts, ‘in a spirit of European friendship and co-operation.’ But most are by members of the band and they enjoy the idiosyncratic – the spooky bass ending of ‘Year of the Metal Rat’, for example. Bourdon is a joyous riposte to dispiriting times. The bumblebee shouldn’t fly – but it does.