Leon Rosselson is a talented and important British folksinger. His best work comes from the 1970s, and is square in the English socialist tradition with a gift for melody and biting satirical lyrics. Sadly, little of this older music is available on CD currently, and the present offering pretty well epitomizes the situation: of its eleven tracks, there is one classic: You Noble Diggers recorded in 1979. The crassness of that track's audio engineering only adds to the sense of time and place of this great song: an angular Dorian march in praise of its mid-Seventeenth Century English agrarian-anarchist namesakes. Try to get a hold of the original "If I Knew Who the Enemy Was" LP if you can for more true vintage Rosselson.Unfortunately, the other songs, recorded twenty years later in 1999, are a pale echo of Rosselson's glory years. The arrangements are slicker, the backings often commercial-sounding, and the advocacy of unabashed, unreconstituted, pre-Cold War socialism recycled with little sense of irony over the events of the intervening years. One song, for example, entitled Postcards from Cuba, expresses an apparent nostalgia for the violent and authoritarian years of post-revolution Cuba. Several of the other 1999 songs seem stuck in a time warp of 1960s politics. There is no commentary on globalization, no exploration of post-Cold War concepts of transnational identity, and no references to the freedom movements that were then bursting out across formerly totalitarian countries from East Germany, Yugoslavia, and the USSR all the way to Nepal. Hearing these songs reminds me of Dylan during his Gospel period, or Wes Montgomery after he abandoned jazz for studio arrangements of pop songs.So in conclusion, this is not Rosselson at his best, save one great song from his heyday. Of the other CDs available currently at Amazon US, I'd prefer Perspectives as a better sampler. But until more of his classic LPs become available in digital format, this is perhaps the best you can do.