Author: Tim Cumming
View album and artist detailsArtist/band: |
The Shee |
Label: |
Proper |
Magazine Review Date: |
Jan/Feb/2013 |
The album art for Murmurations is a work of some genius – each individual cover features a unique image, in silhouette, depicting the endlessly evolving flight patterns of starlings. It’s a nice visual metaphor for the changing feelings people have for each other, and for the way musicians never quite play the same piece twice in the same way. Packaging is important in a digital age divested of physical content. ‘We wanted to give people something unique and personal that couldn't be experienced from simply downloading music,’ the liner notes say.
The music is beautiful. The voices of Rachel Newton, Olivia Ross and Laura-Beth Salter share some fine harmonies over the intricate instrumental play of Shona Mooney and Olivia Ross’ fiddle playing, the accordion and harmonium of Amy Thatcher and the touches of electroharp, Gaelic clarsach, flute and mandolin. The album opens with the traditional ‘Down in the Broom’, led by a woody, thick fiddle, like something from the natural world. There’s ‘Three Knights’, a version of the grisly Child Ballad ‘The Cruel Brother’, a fine instrumental by Ross and Salter in ‘Highlands and Flatlands’ evoking the Scottish Highlands and lowlands of Lincolnshire and unalloyed pleasure in the closing ‘An Till Mise Chaoidh’, a beautiful love song from the Isle of Lewis learnt from the Gaelic singer Joan MacKenzie, which returns us to the haunted tones of ‘Down in the Broom’ – in fact they perform the two as a single piece in concert.
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