ROSS LITTLE

EP: Corrimony

Taking inspiration from the area around his childhood home in Glenurquhart, the six instrumental tracks on this debut EP take us on a wintry walk through the crunchy Ness-shire countryside. Sitting somewhere in between folk and jazz, albeit with a heavy lean to the former, there’s a vastness to this befitting the subject matter and big breathy open spaces that take their time to lilt and fill.

Opening track ‘Carnoch’ is named after an abandoned cottage and led by Little on the accordion with a strange nostalgia, a feel of halfremembered 80s fantasy films and the crumbling pull of the past. On ‘Old Corrimony’ the focus is on Black Isle fiddler Chris Rasdale, who plays a folky reel echoing the birdsong that trills over the tune. ‘Shallager’ is maybe the most jazz-inflected moment, with Little’s piano circling playfully around the bass like the loyal labrador that gave the song its name.

A wide open field full of flashes of delight.

‘Corrimony’ is out now

Chris Queen

Maja Lena

Album: PLUTO

The second album from the Stroud-based singersongwriter takes her floaty English folk songs from the chalk hills of the Cotswolds on a cosmic journey, pairing her rooted natural cadences with the star-crossed synths of eighties anime. Created with long-time musical collaborator Rob Pemberton, the album blurs the lines of organic and electronic sound to create contradictory textures; drum sounds made from beating on a metal filing cabinet distorted to a glassy clang, moog synths trading bars with bass drums and djembes. There’s a Radiophonic Workshop’s worth of play, giving the experimentation an eerie familiarity, a feel of folk horror from the pre-VHS days.

Lena’s voice has a naivety about it, an uncertain falsetto reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan which lends her music a timelessness. While it isn’t ‘folk music’ in a strict sense, there’s a suggestion of those revivalists of the late sixties and early seventies, the cask ale and sandals of Steeleye Span or Pentangle.

The natural world heavily informs the songs, whether it’s the dawn-tinged bristle of ‘Daylight Comes Revealing’ or the snowy somnolence of ‘Silent Quilt’. There’s a feel here of music made outdoors, of long meditative walks on windy moors. There’s a very Anglican cosmicism to it, in the way of Alan Garner: modernism with a tinge of the Morris dance, space travel powered by standing stones.

It all feels like an accomplished execution of a particular inspiration. Lena’s conceptual thinking and visual influence make artists like Bat For Lashes, or Alison Goldfrapp at her more pastoral, feel like obvious touchstones, but some excellent musicianship, a spirit of experimentation and of play give this a distinct voice, a driven psychedelic whirl around the atmosphere to the fields of Avalon.

PLUTO is out now via Chiverin Records

Chris Queen

Pollokshields says

Album: No Thank You

Despite recently scooping the Mercury Prize for fourth studio album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, rapper, singer, and actor Little Simz (Simbiatu Ajikawo) still positions herself very much as an outsider, a truth teller in a sea of glossy pop playlists. This seems fair, as she leans into her vulnerability like few others. Plus, rarely do her vocals get louder than conversational level, which lends real power to her worldly, wise, articulate flow.

This makes her latest album, which landed unexpectedly not long after winning the award, a real delight. It’s arguably her finest by far. The lead single, ‘Gorilla’, is something of a misnomer, with characteristic brass fanfare, playful bassline, and declamatory lines like ‘I got bangers out in the world soarin’ and I got bangers in the vault I been hoardin.’

Elsewhere, the album focuses on a more spiritual path. Eschewing pop elements for soul and gospel, the crisp, rich production by Sault’s Inflo contrasts soaring backing vocals with Simz’s gritty, no-nonsense lyrical delivery.

‘Silhouette’, a string-soaked meditation on authenticity, really sets the tone. There is a lot of space in the album for soul-baring lyricism, as Simz lets the music breathe and build to euphoric highs. Briefly, she sings softly on ‘Who Even Cares’, but lets the choral interludes and extended percussion sequences shine. In the main, it’s Sault’s singer Cleo Sol who takes the soulful vocal duties.

Addressing collective and individual trauma, and navigating her way through a tough contemporary Britain where we all face an uncertain, difficult future, Simz has created a masterpiece here. It’s audacious, raw, and beautiful, full of bruised defiance and tentative hope for a new year where old systems are dismantled, replaced by something more humane.

No Thank You is out now via Forever Living Originals

Juliette Lemoine

Album: Soaring

Juliette Lemoine’s cello is first to stretch its wiry fingers out from the ambient hum that beckons in the first track of her debut album, Soaring It’s an opening that sets up Lemoine’s mission statement: to celebrate the cello ‘being played in a way that the fiddle normally would, leading the musical narrative’. Soaring is an album about freedom. And just as Lemoine celebrates her own sense of liberation as she graduated university and recovered from illness, so does she free her instrument from the constraints of genre conventions.

Lemoine is part of a growing scene of musicians fusing Scottish traditional music with jazz to create free-flowing, lyrical melodies embedded in the Scottish landscape. Her debut LP follows releases last year by pianist Fergus McCreadie and saxophonist Matt Carmichael, both of whom play on Lemoine’s album along with acclaimed fiddler Charlie Stewart.

Carmichael’s soft, playful sax is light and airy next to the cello’s raw, earthy tenor, while McCreadie’s piano glistens bright and pristine. On ‘Twilight in a City Park’ Lemoine’s cello brings a warmth you wouldn’t get from the lonely lament of a violin, while McCreadie brings out touches of light in the gloaming. On ‘Peak’, the piano is let loose, running away with itself as the strings chase each other in an ecstatic dance.

Stewart’s silken fiddle winds its way through the mix, draping a silvery trail over the track ‘Persian Omelette’. But it is the cello that makes up the fabric of the album itself, its fibrous threads weaving excitedly through the quartet’s rugged tapestry.

Soaring is out now

Zoë White

Death Valley Girls

Album: Islands in the Sky

Endorsed by the one and only Iggy Pop, who starred in a previous video for their single ‘Disaster (Is What We’re After)’, Death Valley Girls’ trajectory of making brilliant music continues. This is their fifth studio album, the follow-up to Under The Spell of Joy. It makes sense that Iggy is a fan, as they’re absolutely badass.

More expansive than before but still as uncompromising as ever, the themes of space, magic, love, and heartbreak chime with their mystical aesthetic. ‘Journey to Dog Star’ and ‘What Are the Odds’ evoke the churning, dark side of sixties psychedelia, with the latter their unique existential spin on Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’. There are influences like the films of Kenneth Anger and Antonioni, The Shangri-Las, The Stooges (of course) and The Seeds’ musical palette, whereas towards the end, tracks ‘Watch the Sky’ and ‘It’s All Really Kind of Amazing ‘ are brighter, but no less trippy. ‘Magic Powers’ even resembles more recent bands like Ladytron, with its zesty synth sound.

Organ, saxophone, and blistering guitars weave around Bonnie Bloomgarden’s passionate vocals and chanted backing vocals, making the band seem like some kind of kooky, supernatural biker girl gang. But their retro stylings are only one half of where they sit, as they sound timeless. Indeed, they are more likely to pull out some impressive dance moves than a flick knife. They may look mean, but they mean well.

Islands in the Sky is out 25th February from Suicide Squeeze

Lorna Irvine

Catriona Price

Album: Hert

‘Wur hert is a ba.’ The debut album from composer Catriona Price opens with a collage of voices talking about the famous Ba’ game that takes over the streets of Kirkwall on New Year’s Day, setting up a piece exploring themes of home and the ties that bind us to it through a distinct Orcadian lens. Using lyrics from the poetry of a range of Orkney artists, including George Mackay Brown, Harry Josephine Giles, and Margaret Tait, Price weaves their words through flutes and strings, pulling folk and jazz influences into a yearning elegy to the archipelago.

The album gives us flashes of the character of island life, people and dogs mentioned in the broad knowing way of the small town; the eccentricities and personalities that make up the daily conversation of the community where a couple of words tell a long story. There’s a wry humour that’s in particular evidence on ‘No Such Thing as Belonging’, where an affectionate, weary mockery only available to those who love a place without condition zips over Grappelliesque violin with a knowing wink.

An impressive cast of musicians – Seonaid Aitken on violin and Tom Gibbs’ flicking piano quarter tones among them – bring a range and versatility to Price’s compositions.

While there is a pop sensibility to some of the album, it seems designed to be listened to as a whole that builds towards the emotional punch of the last quarter of the piece. ‘Storms’ raises a defiant fist to the world and demands to be challenged, with ‘Energy at the End of the World’ pulling a catastrophic float into the final track ‘If’; a distraught but peaceful conclusion that home and heart reside in people and memory as much as a physical place. Hert has that duality at its core: the push and pull of a relationship with the places and people who form us.

Hert is out now

Chris Queen