Playlouder - Music is the Network

Grouped with a generation of musicians including the Beta Band and the Bees, who approach the traditional music of the British Isles with a loose interpretation and gentle experimentalism, It's Jo And Danny have reissued their 2000 debut album, but five years on this hasn't aged as gracefully as the music of their peers.

'Solar Plexus', with its accelerated strumming, buoyant beats and rushing euphoria is an excellent opening track but much of the album falls short of its promise to be a collection of feelgood hits of the summer. Tracks such as 'Hippy Thinking', 'Repentant Song' and 'Love Expression' are pleasant enough on the ears but barely rise above mildly diverting pastoral singalongs; whimsical shoegazing rather than an eclectic embracing of traditional influences.

Lyrically, too, this is a let down. On 'Pilgrim's Prayer', Bartlett sings: "Music makes the world go round / every heart and every beat / feel the grass beneath my feet", which is so trite and tossed-off it is worthy of a soundtracking a Sunny Delight ad. Overall, instrumentals such as 'Arkle' fare better, with the often dreary songs sounding more rain-dampened than sun-dappled. This reissue contains four extra tracks, three of which are taken from their Playing for Kicks EP, none of which is impressive enough to leave us feeling that we have been spoilt.

Jo Bartlett and Danny Hagan secured themselves a place in popular music when they founded the Green Man festival, the annual folk and folktronica festival (a sort of acoustic ATP) in a field in Wales a few summers ago. It's a festival that has brought definition to a previously nebulous movement.

But is this a "defining album"? Not really, but maybe this is because the music they have helped promote, especially Four Tet, has so dramatically overtaken their own that theirs inevitably sounds a little dated, as does their use of sampled sounds of answerphone messages and snatches of dialogue. Ultimately, they are better programmers than performers and should be celebrated more for the music they encourage rather than the music they have made.

Dafydd Goff