Reviews

Artist:Linda Moylan
Album: The Merchant
Label: Talking Elephant
Tracks: 13
Website: https://www.lindamoylan.co.uk

Produced by and featuring Phil Beer with Odette Michell on backing vocals, the Waterford-born, London-based Irish singer's second album is a more folk focused affair than her debut, albeit veined with country, blues and even cabaret flavours. All bar two tracks are self-penned or co-writes (largely with Ian Montague), the brace of traditionals lining up as the yearning Scottish ballad 'Black Is The Colour' with a wintry arrangement featuring Beer on harp, viola and trembling bells and, from Ireland, a heavy bass and percussion structured 'Star Of The County Down', appropriately replete with Irish whistle.

It opens, though, with Eamon Gilmore collaboration 'Old Black Boots', a jaunty, blues inflected strumalong with Beer on dobro in memory of, presumably, a homeless guru smelling of Tennants, tobacco and Staffs terrier "with "Just a purple radio and battery/Cold leather and booze" but who "taught me to talk/And he taught me to listen", a dispenser of the wisdom of the streets.

Memories (and another mention of Christmas) also inform the fiddle-backed simple strum 'Sugar Water 'with its reminiscences of youthful fire and passion ("Remember that night we were drinking mad/And I went out and smashed your van and I'd walk across the glass just to get to you/And when I got home you didn't open your eyes you just laid there and slowly smiled n said lady/You're a little a me") tempered with the awareness that "that time turns ya/Pain learns ya/That nothing in this world ever last forever so you gotta take the good times while you can", topped off with the warmness that "I know that when you hold my hand something in my heart just understands/That sugar waters gonna keep me safe tonight".

As you'll have gathered, her lyrics tend to offer feelings rather than details, though the slow waltzing Weimar cabaret shaded 'Ordinary Merchants', Montague on mandola, clearly speaks of mental illness ("You think madness is pretty baby/Come and sleep in its bed… Cause it loves you then hates you/And twists everything that you say") as she turns her barbs on "All you machine gun poets …just spitting out the shit that you've read", though whether the line "You were a mother once/A good mother once/I know cause I felt that from you" should (like anything else here) be read autobiographically is open to question, she is, after all, very much a storyteller and adopter of personas, something firmly evidenced by the Irish fiddle and mandolin waltzer 'Auld Drag'.

Riding a tinkling piano, mandolin and acoustic guitar melody with Gilmore on counterpoint vocals, yet again reflection of younger days is at the heart of 'Thinking On' conjured in the T.S.Eliot like poetry of "the night smell snakes in slowly like old whiskey makes marble of my mind pulls me back to smallest child hands where rust barrels caught rain tea towels rest on bushes hot water makes leaves steam and the night it comes with stories haunted lovers and hunted thieves", recollecting her teacher ("I wonder if she knows/That I'll write of her blue eyes and the poets she longs to know " and how "I didn't like school cause the words go in all wrong/I still learn with my hands".

Tossed and turbulent relationships provide the impetus for several numbers, the bluesy, slide and fiddle lurching 'Push' ("I couldn't stretch myself far enough for you/Each inch that I spread out I just split myself in two"), the hushed, quiveringly sung, fingerpicked 'Mercy' ("You move me/I wish that I moved you/Cause in the darkest, darkest night/My compass points to you") and, an album highpoint, calling the McGarrigles to mind, the deeply sad 'Hippodrome' ("Just lately love evades me and I'm feeling the cold/Just lately grace evades and I'm feeling old") that uses the image of a long torn down building to evoke a heavy sense of loss ("I'll be where the hippodrome used to be…I've seen all there is to see/I'm thinkin on you are you thinking on me lately").

Being an Irish folk album there is, of course, a song about ships, the sea and emigration, here, with its fiddle and bodhran, in the form of the slow steamrollering drive of 'Brig Hannah' which, through eyes of one of the ill-fated passengers, recounts the fate of the titular vessel which, transporting emigrants escaping the Irish Famine from Warrenpoint and Newry to Quebec in Canada in 1849, foundered and sank in the Gulf of St Lawrence, the captain and two officers taking the only lifeboat and leaving the crew and passengers to fend for themselves, resulting in the deaths of 49.

The final two tracks both turn on concerns of insecurity and self-identity, the first, arranged around piano and slide and somewhere between Tori Amos and Marianne Faithful, being the slowly gathering 'Glistening Gold', which finds the singer, a child again and once more with a Christmas backdrop, in "those icy/Tenements in our tiny rooms with those tiny views", and she sings "I burn blue I'm ice cold through/And I'm a walking womanly in perfect misery in our London Town …So I fix my coat , cause god I'm just fucking cold/I eye a wreath on a bottle green door, it's glistening gold" and achingly wonders "can I be glistening gold?" Followed by a coda of the Irish schoolyard song of infanticide 'Weile Weile'.

And it ends with the simple piano and acoustic guitar waltzing cabaret inflections of 'The Eaves' which, surely drawing on Dagmar Krause and Edith Piaf as an influence, closes with the heartbreaking "there's a room inside of me/I've been locked out/you're the door and I'm the key…the loneliest child you've ever seen looked up with searching eyes says , where have you been?" and the repeated refrain "Are you who you'd thought you'd be?" I'd venture this is a remarkable coming of age. On the almost title track she sings "we're just ordinary merchants trading souls"; you should make an investment.

Mike Davies

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