Best Day

Brought up in the Scottish Highlands, Glasgow-based multi-instrumentalists Mairearad Green and Anna Massie have developed a reputation for their accomplished, warm and endearingly scatty live duo performances. They have also achieved individual success as, respectively, Composer of the Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards in 2009 and BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year in 2003. At its best this third album of theirs lives up to expectations.

Green's nimble accordion playing and Massie's swinging guitar accompaniment on the splendid opening track, ‘The Red Poppy’, call to mind Scotland's 1980s swing-folk treasures The Easy Club and the dancing ‘Musical Flowers’ has a lovely relaxed expressiveness that's doubtless a product of the pair's longstanding friendship onstage and off. Slightly iffy pipes tuning and a rather stodgy, forced guitar part make ‘MSR’ less of a comfortable listen, while the two songs – Dougie Maclean's ‘She Loves Me (When I Try)’ and Nanci Griffith's ‘Always Will’ – are not wholly convincing. But the rustic banjo-led momentum of ‘Bottle Island’ and the sheer swashbuckling verve of the closing ‘Pipe Reels’ ensure that normal service is restored.