Author: Peter Quinn
View album and artist detailsArtist/band: |
Pauline Scanlon |
Label: |
Pauline Scanlon |
Magazine Review Date: |
July/2022 |
This new solo album from vocalist Pauline Scanlon offers striking, singularly personal interpretations of ten traditional songs that range from a mesmerising take on ‘The Bird in the Bush’ to the sumptuous textures of ‘Lady Leroy’. In ‘The Well Below the Valley-O’ the crystalline purity of Scanlon’s voice combines mellifluously with that of Armagh singer-songwriter Barry Kerr, who also contributes guitar, flute and pipes. Producer and Scanlon’s long-time collaborator John Reynolds provides the subtle percussive pulse here. An imaginative arrangement of ‘As I Roved Out’ features Scanlon in duet with the fantastic young Co Tyrone singer, Loinnir McAliskey, while ‘Cé A Chuirfidh Tú Liom?’ (featuring fellow West Kerry vocalist Bernie Pháid) presents a captivating paean to female friendship. Underpinned by Chris Pemberton’s monolithic synth pad and Aidan O’Rourke’s layered fiddle lines, Scanlon’s duet with Damien Dempsey on the affecting Child Ballad of love and loss, ‘The Unquiet Grave’, is as fine an account of this song as you could wish to hear. Scanlon’s storytelling gift is heard to especially moving effect on the Northumbrian ballad ‘Felton Lonnin’, one of several songs on this collection to be enriched by the harmony vocals of Nicola Joyce.
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