Rags & Robes

Twenty four-year-old Scottish folk singer Ewan McLennan's star is very much on the rise. In February, he won the Horizon Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and the measured maturity of this debut album is testament to his talent. McLennan delivers uncompromising social comment via traditional song in the potent tradition of artists such as Woody Guthrie, Ewan MacColl and Billy Bragg.

The inequities of the working life, poverty and the travails of foot soldiers and the travelling man are laid bare in a delicate style that is beautifully accompanied by McLennan's finger-picking guitar style. This album is a sober, solo affair, save for a couple of appearances by fiddler Peter Tickell and Jackie Oates on viola and harmony vocals. McLennan interprets traditional ballads such as ‘Tramps and Hawkers’ and ‘As I Roved Out’, canonical classics such as Burns’ ‘A Man's A Man’ and MacColl's take on ‘Jamie Foyers’, and class-consciousness songs such as ‘Joe Hill’, about a US songwriter and labour activist executed by the state, and ‘Jute Mill Song’ by Dundee socialist activist Mary Brooksbank. However, what is striking is that the two McLennan-penned tracks on the album, ‘Yorkshire Regiment’ and ‘Another Morning's Beggar’, do not stand out from the crowd as awkward or self-conscious contemporary anachronisms, but blend effortlessly with seasoned classics. That fact alone is praise indeed.