Reviews

Artist:Graeme Armstrong
Album: You Are Free
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.graemearmstrongmusic.com

One third of Talisk and co-founder of the Rachel Hamer Band, this marks Armstrong's solo debut on which, he playing guitars, he backed by such notable names as Rachel Newton, Duncan Lyall, Mattie Foulds and Michael Owens for a traditional, self-penned and covers collection sung in his distinctive Borders brogue.

Traditionals bookend the album, opening with his reworking of 'Isle Of France', beginning with a rumbling drone that gives way to just synth and his voice, a brief powerful keyboard and drums flurry arriving midway in before fading back for the final seconds, then closing with 'Fine Flowers In The Valley', a doom-heavy Scottish variant of 'The Cruel Mother' adapted from Robert Burns, again given an edgy synth arrangement by Keir Long and swollen with electric guitar that's far removed from the familiar more forlorn and subdued approach. The third traditional choice also gets a makeover, murder ballad 'My Son David' havening underlying Van Morrison hints and taken at a slow walking pace with tolling key notes and given a full brass arrangement by Owens.

Likewise, there's three originals, first up being the largely acoustic salt breeze swayalong title track, a song written about the loss of a close friend while, by contrast, it's becoming a father that informs the slow fingerpicked musing of 'William's Song', though, whereas the former was a rousing celebration of her being set free from pain, the lyrical mood here is perversely more about warning his son he's coming into a cold and lonely world ("no warmth to the room…no fields of gold/No Roots to this tree") advising "you won't like what you see". The mood is, perhaps, explained by the third of his songs, the rippling rhythm 'Sit Alone', which, amid a tumult of synths and keys offsetting the delicate acoustic guitar and Newton's backing vocals, deals with a family relationship breakdown ("after 30 years or more, you sit alone/It's not what you were asking for").

For the four covers, he's turned to artists who have served as inspiration, bringing his own slant to their compositions, the first being Edinburgh's veteran songwriter Sandy Wright who, while probably not familiar to many as a performer, was nominated as Composer of The Year at the 2008 Scot's Trad Music Awards and has been championed and covered by the likes Eddi Reader, Karine Polwart and Kris Drever, the latter having recorded Armstrong's choice of 'Beads And Feathers', here its hymn to endurance of the land and a plea to resist superficial temptations give a wistful Celtic mist reading (though a booklet typo turns miners into minors). Polwart herself is represented with a shimmeringly anthemic 'Waterlily' followed in close succession by a piano and brass burnished setting of Michael Marra's 'The Beast' (written, I assume, for Liz Lochead's Beauty and the Beast and only ever recorded on his 2010 live album with Mr McFalls Chamber) and, finally, Dick Gaughan's 'Both Sides of the Tweed', his rework of a traditional song about the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England, here resplendent with ringing notes and Newton's backing vocals on the anthemic soaring chorus. Whether this is a one-off born of the lockdown or proves a springboard to a solo career side project, it's an album of which he can justly proud.

Mike Davies

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