Last year Eddie Vedder released his second solo album. He was renowned in the ’90s for his loud, fast paced and thoroughly enjoyable grunge music, but this one’s a little different. The musical accompaniment is almost exclusively the ukulele. Gone is the distorted guitar, the thrashing bass line and the heavy drums; in is the gentle strumming of nylon strings on a miniature body. It is a superb album and works, despite the antithetical nature of the sounds being brought to the table. The argument can be made that it works simply because of this dichotomy: the delicacy of the ukulele and the strength of Eddie Vedder’s voice, so suited to rawk, suddenly finds subtle hints and tones and edges that were never so clear before.

This is not a new phenomenon, not the first time an album has come straight out of left field. Scarlett Johansson produced a covers album of Tom Waits’ songs, Paul Anka produced a rock covers album and Bob Dylan made a (perhaps ill-advised) Christmas album. It is, however, one of the few times an album so different from the artists standard offering has been so good.

The Balvenie is all about honey. If you read their tasting notes, the word honey is mentioned almost as much as is humanly possible. It is impossible to drink any of their product and not think honey. What they are not about is peat-smoke. Although their maltings are peated, using peat from New Pitsligo (about 40 miles from the distillery, also famous for lace), they have never sought a peated profile and, until recently, they almost appeared to go out of their way to avoid the smoky flavours. In 2001, they released their Islay Cask – a 17year old expression finished for a matter of months in a refill Islay cask. Although they have never stated which distillery the casks were from, it is likely that it began with an L-, and ended with -aphroaig. I didn’t get a chance to try that one but I did get some of their latest smoky iteration, The Peated Cask.

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