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Set commemorating Duncan’s time with the band (and featuring Gordon Duncan Jr.). Eighteen albums in, and they are still finding new and fresh things to do: by my reckoning Òrach is their most enjoyable album so far. I wonder if they’ll retire some decade soon.
compassrecords.com
Rather younger than the aforemen- tioned, Beinn Lee are a six-piece band from Uist steeped in traditional music from Scot- land’s wild west, but very contemporary in approach. Probably as a result of five years playing all sorts of gigs (‘Weddings, Bah-Mitz- vahs and Funerals’ as the saying goes), their line-up of accordeon, fiddle, pipes & flute, guitar, piano, drums and vocals (both Gaelic and English) enables them to ring the changes and they make the most of it. Their debut album shows them as a one-band ceilidh-cum- festival – they’re equally at home being a Scottish Dance Band (Allasdair Uilleim’s), an up-tempo and loud contender for the Tannhill’s slot (Rills), a Celtic Rock band, Bat- tlefield with bells on, a sensitive acoustic pop singer-songwriter combo or bidding for the ‘anthemic stadium folk’ Runrig Mark 2 awards. Which isn’t to suggest Beinn Lee are derivative – just bursting with enthusiasm and ideas. One suspects they really had three or four different albums up their sleeves. This one is a belter – roll on the next one.
beinnlee.com
Trail West are another band with strong links to South Uist and Tiree, but have – like many others – made the journey suggested by the album title. Making waves as a four- piece, they’ve added Jonathan Gillespie (vocals, keyboards and bass) and Allan J Nairn (electric guitar) to extend their sound. After an invigorating set of pipe tunes, McAlpine’s Fusiliers taken at break-neck speed, and a splendidly raucous up-tempo take on Andy M. Stewart’s Take Her In Your Arms, the slow- er song Mo Ghruagach Dhonn comes as a bit of surprise, but is no less welcome. As is the utterly delightful Belfast Mountains – learnt from the ubiquitous Aaron Jones. Clearly capable as a superb, toe-tapping ceilidh/dance band, they too have spread their musical wings considerably wider while retaining a cohesive and exciting sound (if perhaps not as wide as Beinn Lee). Highly rec- ommended indeed.
trail-west.com
Equally special is the trio Dowally’s sec- ond album. Rachel Walker (fiddle, low whis- tle) is rooted in the Scottish tradition and Daniel Abrahams (guitar, bass) the Edinburgh jazz scene, while Phil Alexander (accordeon, piano) is a composer and scholar of Klezmer music. Guest musician Graham Coe’s edgy cello also gives significant breadth to the sound. Eight quirky and rhythmically chal- lenging original tracks drawing influences from all over the place; a joyous cover of the Arctic Monkeys’ Fluorescent Adolescent and an unusual version of Lennon & McCartney’s And I Love Her mark Dowally as a very differ- ent band to many of the outfits to emerge from the Scottish folk scene. Impossible to pigeon-hole (good!), unlikely to be appear- ing at a local fiddle and box club or playing for Scottish Dances (but doubtless capable of doing so), and hugely enjoyable.
dowally.com Bob Walton
LLEUWEN Gwn Glân Beibl Budr Sain SAIN SCD2805
Lleuwen can sing in any style: folk, jazz, blues, country. Her fourth album mixes her own songwriting with Welsh traditional reli- gious material to explore the question: what do we do with love after separation? These superbly crafted compositions ask this ques-
KELLY THOMA As The Winds Die Down Kelly Thoma
Crete is one of those fortunate places in Europe where the music blaring from a car driving through a village in the interior is quite likely not to be pan-global boom-tiss but Cretan, probably featuring the island’s distinctive form of lyra.
Lyra master Kelly Thoma, Piraeus-born but having been brought to Crete by the music and her partner Ross Daly, has become
Kelly Thoma
tion on many levels: romantic, spiritual, polit- ical. Ballads like the softly soulful, quietly bro- ken-hearted Hwyr are simultaneously about love, faith and politics. Accompanied by gui- tars, piano, violin, triple-harp, bass, Ham- mond organ and drums, Lleuwen’s songs express the emotional turmoil of navigating between loss and love, despair and hope, iso- lation and communion.
Cofia Fi and Y Garddwr are songs that mix the sacred and the sensuous in the gospel tradition of spiritual yearning. Caerdydd is a slow-jazz, smouldering torch song to an old lover, in which the earthly beloved blurs into the divine Beloved: “To love another person is to see the face of God”.
Tir Na Nog is a beautiful Eva Cassidy-style folk-blues ballad, with delicate violin and gui- tar accompaniment; Lleuwen sings wistfully about a land beyond death where we will find those we’ve lost. In the traditional vigil prayer Myn Mair, a discordant guitar is tran- scended by Lleuwen’s gentle, jazz-inflected singing of an ancient Welsh Catholic song to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Lleuwen’s arrangement of the well-
known hymn Cwm Rhondda uses a taut guitar pulse, pizzicato strings, dramatic percussion and a wonder-struck vocal to make us hear with fresh ears its message of fervent hope.
The song Bendigeidfran draws on the
medieval Welsh legend of a mythological giant who made himself into a bridge across the ocean to reconcile warring peoples. Lleuwen’s tender, emotive, intimate vocal begs the giant king Bendigeidfran to return “to bridge the sea of loneliness between strangers and friends”. Lleuwen is a Welsh singer, living in France, watching Brexit unfold from afar.
lleuwen.com Paul Matheson
an integral part of its musical culture and a contributor to it. Here’s an album of her com- positions. They’re songs, of philosophy, love and symbolism, in the largely 15-syllable poetic form called mantinada, which is also used to accompany dancing (an excellent way to propagate songs).
The lyrics of these eight tracks are mainly by Mitsos Stavrakakis, and they’re sung by two of Crete’s leading musicians, Vasilis Stavrakakis and laouto player Giorgis Manolakis. The trio – these two with Kelly on lyra – is joined on some tracks by Ross Daly on percussion, tarhu or saz, and percussionist Giannis Papatzanis.
The opener, the evocatively named title track, comes smacking in, energetic and so full in sound it seems like a bigger ensemble over which rides Manolakis’s earthy voice. Vrehei (Rain) brings Stavrakakis’s voice rising from narrative to declamatory. The reflective Pe Mou Dentro (The Tree’s Song), for which Kelly composed both music and lyrics, is a keening lament sung by Manolakis, followed by Tremai To Fylokardi Mou (My Heart Is Trembling), whose rousing, almost military march big sound, in which the top lyra line has a sound that could be mistaken for a ney, contrasts meaningfully with the lyrics expressing the pain of separation of a lover from her foreign-war-bound beloved.
The booklet, while partly bilingual, gives the lyrics only in Greek. Clearly they share importance with the music, but Kelly writes on her website, “I chose not to include trans- lations of these mantinades for two reasons. Firstly, because I never thought that this very idiomatic project would attract the interest of people outside of Crete, let alone outside of Greece, but mainly because I find it almost impossible to transmit the atmosphere and the connotations of these words, some of which have no corresponding ones in English.” She has, however, relented and given her own translations on the website, and they read well.
Whether one understands Greek or not, the music here, its shapes, melodies, textures and abundant life, communicates across lan- guage barriers, being made by these musi- cians who are masters of their instruments and voices, deeply versed in and inspired by the subtleties and essence of Cretan music, making songs that add significantly to its rich living tradition.
kellythoma.com Andrew Cronshaw
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