As Seth Lakeman's career develops - "matures" isn't the right word for a guy who started out, aged 17, playing guitar and demon fiddle for Kate Rusby - he seems to have settled on bombast as the best way to get the folk word out. Sad to say, Hearts and Minds finds the Devonian musician stomping and yodeling his way through a collection of originals whose style and sentiment call to mind nothing so much as the Levellers, the crusty tribe that made English music festivals such a grim prospect in the mid 1990s. The title track has strident stuff about rising up and resisting the "weight of the government's hand", while "remember[ing] there's people in constant need". Later we get sixth-form poetry about "black holes in the sky". Hints of his old flair for narrative song reappear on Preacher's Ghost, the unlikely story of a score-settling royal zombie. Still, in former days Lakeman could make episodes from the English civil war sound as urgent as news reports; that he's reduced to this sort of chapbook schlock suggest his talent isn't getting any sharper with age. Typically, the quiet numbers cut the deepest. The countryish Stepping Over You an Anglicised Ryan Adams, circa Heartbreaker. The Circle Grows benefits from a sparse acoustic guitar figure and jazzy double-bass reminiscent of Danny Thompson's work for John Martyn, while Lakeman's raw vocal conjures the ghost of Jeff Buckley. Even so, it's too little, too late to help his cause. Most hearts and minds will have switched off by this point.
