Still as Your Sleeping

There’s a paradox at the heart of this album from Scottish singer-songwriter Karine Polwart and pianist Dave Milligan. It is that a project conceived during lockdown by two musicians from the same Scottish village, and which is so redolent of place but yet also cut through with a sense of travel and movement – both through land and seascape and through life. Polwart is a master at the art of excavating detail and tapping into our need for belonging. Her work has often focused on her homeland – not simply Scotland, but the village of Pathhead and its moorlands. There’s the sense that she’s burrowing down, like the protagonist in Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, into the very soil of Midlothian. Yet she is also burrowing into life, and its passing. Here there are traditional songs of parting (‘Craigie Hill’, ‘The Parting Glass’ and Burns’ ‘Ae Fond Kiss’), and self-penned reflections on mortality (‘Heaven’s Hound’, ‘The Path That Winds Before Us’ and the mesmeric ‘Siccar Point’).

Polwart is quietly building a body of work that makes the most compelling case for folk music as a vital, living tradition. Her songs offer a profound solace usually only found in the traditional songbook. This is another majestic work, deceptive in its simplicity, poignant in its accomplished, stripped down musicianship.