Taliesyn are:
Jan Bičovský – lead vocals, bouzouki, harmonica
Vojtěch Jindra – acoustic and electric guitars, mandolin
Robert Fischmann – flute, low whistle, high whistle, backvocals, percussions
Filip Benešovský – bass guitar, backvocals
Jiří Neužil – keybords
Radim Chrobok – drums

The music on the second album by the Czech band Taliesyn skips sadly and stumbles „Merrily“ (hence the title – Zvesela!) over and beyond styles – away from the traditional music of the British Isles and Czech and Moravian landlocked leas and across jazz, blues, even rock and classic. „Zvesela! (Merrily) is the chorus in the song Výčepní (Bartender) and it somehow fits the feel in most songs – gloomy, introspective or at times even mischievous“ says the singer Jan Bicovsky.


The 14 tracks were recorded in the V studio in Zlin over a fortnight. The band is still as delightfully unable to keep to one style as before. There something for everyone: three traditional songs – a lover’s complaint „Black Is The Colour“, a ballad about the polar explorer „Lord Franklin“, and the „Cobbler“, an Irish murder ballad of sorts once made famous by the late Tommy Makem. There are two blues numbers - Blind Willie Johnson’s „I Just Can’t Keep From Crying“ in a 5/4 time and Cyril Tawneys’s „Sally Free & Easy“, the first real British blues written, as the author claimed. The rest is Taliesyn’s own. Riddlesong was inspired by the Pentangle as well as Old English alliterative riddles and opens the album with a question of love and death which the following thirteen songs are trying to answer, and warns that whoever attempts to break the riddle should “remember that not all is true that rhymes”. „Sentimentality“ portrays a maudlin burnt-out poet whose voice is gone and there is only the „cheap sentimentality he always was running away from like dog-hunted thief“. Next is a real treat for the die-hard folkies - „Výčepní“ - with prepared piano, uncertain harmony and lots of screaming and cursing followed by a little dainty dessert “Ten Cocroaches in A Jar”, which fades out an.......
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