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Review: 'HONEYCUTTERS, THE'
'On The Ropes'   

-  Label: 'Organic Records'
-  Genre: 'Alt/Country' -  Release Date: '12th September 2016'

Our Rating:
A woman walks into a bar.

Well, more than one bar actually.

Although, on the title track, this woman concedes "I'm no stranger to the barroom floor" and elsewhere proposes Let's Get Drunk, it is love, not boozed up oblivion, she is searching for.

The woman in question is songwriter and singer Amanda Anne Platt from Asheville, North Carolina.

She is sassy and streetwise so is used to battling for what she wants. Nevertheless she does not win every time. This produces some cynicism.

On Golden Child she sings ruefully: "the price of winning ain't worth all the lonely it buys". and goes to prove that "love ain't ever black and white" (Blue Besides).

There is always hope though. On Piece Of Heaven the attitude is more determined "I never thought love was worth the fight, now I'm pulling my punches".

These sentiments form the central cut and thrust of On The Ropes, the fourth studio album by this quintet in which her four man backing band play uninspiring country-tinged arrangements. This includes an unforgivably trite eight minute bluegrass rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

The collection begins and ends in a bar.

The closing song, Barmaid's Blues, is the sad tale of a woman who has spent years serving others and is wondering if it's all been worth it.   

Life and love are full of choices and compromises and these thirteen songs address the familiar dilemmas efficiently but do so in a manner that is way too predictable.

To follow the boxing metaphor, we are left with a band who never punch above their weight or seem able to deliver a killer blow.

The Honeycutters' website
  author: Martin Raybould

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HONEYCUTTERS, THE - On The Ropes