Tri Yann - Dix ans, dix filles (1973)

Take your mind off that cover: no acid for you here. For me, this is actually (up to the misleading cover art) the low point of Tri Yann's early years; only by the third album do I find they truly came into their own, usually decent, slightly macho, Breton folk self (for a while, anyway; at least until Urba). Here, however, amidst Scottish and Irish numbers, they overplay the cultural pretense of setting their Breton heritage in the wider frame of the celtic diaspora - which programmatically plagued some of their other records, but not to this misguided extent (that damn banjo) - and a bewildering lot of this kind of comes off like the French answer to the country-western clog dance. Thankfully, things would get better next time around. Who said genre-hopping is an inherently good thing?