Reviews
Kate MacLeod's Mind The Gap Album: Home Brewed
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 8
Website: https://www.katemacleod.com/
Award-winning, Virginia-based MacLeod's first full-length recording with her neo-traditional band, guitarist Paul Hammerton, acoustic bassist John Bryant, and mandolinist and banjoist Matthew Metz, this brings together old-time Appalachian (she plays Appalachian lap dulcimer), bluegrass, vintage country, Celtic and folk influences on a memorable set of songs and instrumentals.
Recorded during the winter of 2025-2026, laying down a song at a time in a home studio as the snow piled up, the process gave rise to the title. It opens, fittingly, with the early country sounds of the Carter-family shaded 'I Will Sing My Heart Out', written during her artist residency at Pennsylvania's Pendle Hill Quaker Study, Retreat and Conference Centre, its apology message encapsulated in the lines "because your troubled heart can't hear my words, I will sing them to you".
Pushing past seven minutes, the mandolin-trilling 'Never Looked So Good To Me Before' is a lovely slow jogging love letter to a new romance ("There's a smile on my face/That wasn't there before I met you/Now even time has a different pace/And even my friends can see I love you") filtered through the beauty of the Virginia countryside ("The green grass in the fields/The white bark of the sycamore/The dry leaves from last year/That cover the forest floor").
Her home state gets three other nods, the self-penned choppy rhythm bluegrassy 'Good Old Virginia' with its celebration of the people who work that land ("Scattered over the miles/Are the hopes of the people there/Who've dug for clay in the hillsides/And fished in the morning air)" and the ties that bind ("I know that I could leave here/But I'm not at all inclined to/Because I've put my roots into your fields/And wrapped my life around you/And so has my sweetheart/We're in this together". It's apparently informed by Hammerton's connection to the land and his life in a historic station house, he in turn taking the vocal spotlight for a cover of Utah Phillips's 'The Green Rolling Hills Of West Virginia' with its ambivalent sentiments of "the green rolling hills of West Virginia/Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know/Though the times are sad and drear and I cannot linger here/They'll keep me and never let me go" as he bemoans the hardships of a miner's life, the narrator reflecting that, while he may have moved away to find work, the pull of home remains. And, finally, there's the dancing fiddle and rippling banjo of 'The Old Charles Town Pike', an instrumental doffing the cap to and named for one of the state's winding historic highways.
Moving from Virginia, Washington State provides the inspiration for the weaving fiddle-driven instrumental 'The Moon and Mount Rainier', a tribute to the active volcano and the centrepiece of Mount Rainier National Park. The band's joined by singer Meya Collings and guitarist Dylan Schorer on the vocally high pitched love song 'Sometimes A Sound' ("You can turn a head with a word/But turn a life around with a love that's strong") where that love can be felt in more than what's said, heard in "the playground/And the children of any town/And the barroom and the courtroom/And the music of the wedding gown", the album completed by a homage to bluegrass legend Kenny Baker on his good time fiddle tunes 'Cross-Eyed Fiddler/Denver Belle'. The musical equivalent of sitting in a cooling breeze on a hot day, look for it in the traditional album of the year awards come December.
Mike Davies
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The Old Charles Town Pike
Fatea Showcase Sessions
The Fatea Showcase Sessions are a series of downloads featuring acts that we've really enjoyed and think that more people should get the chance to hear.
Corsair is the current session and features 16 fantastic artists check out the website to find out more about them and download your copy
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