Kaela Rowan
Album: Menagerie
Label: Shoogle
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.kaelarowan.com

Kaela's been involved in the groundbreaking side of modern Scottish music for some years, having served her time as lead vocalist with crossover fusion outfit Mouth Music before co-founding spicy combo The Bevvy Sisters a couple of years ago. This solo project, however, is informed principally by the fierce creative influence of Kaela's collaborator James Mackintosh, who conjures limpid ambient adventures around Kaela's lyrics, enveloping her voice in gently textured sonic atmospherics.

More often than not this works to the songs' advantage, as their joint compositions Lady and Wool Gathering best demonstrate. And the various musical elements - percussion, guitars, bass, kalimba and subtle programming - both sensitively cradle and complement Kaela's own swooning voice and delicate guitars, ukulele and percussion, with the occasional additional interpolation of found sounds from nature. But pleasing though the album sounds as a whole, its early and final stages especially seem just to drift by in an anonymous ambient wash, and it's only with the central tracks like the eight-minute Ballad, whose animated gait and compelling narrative wins the day, and the reassuring Save The Day, with its lengthy build that's entirely justified, that a clear focus and direction emerges from the mists.

Kaela's straightforward, unadventurous cover of David Byrne's Naïve Melody (This Must Be The Place), a surprising choice amongst the predominantly self-penned material on offer here, rather overstays its welcome at over six minutes, as does the sprawling, repetitive Move On Sam, which at four minutes merely recycles a chord progression with little in the way of musical or lyrical development. And Quee McArthur's disco ballad To Never Know goes nowhere in particular. So in all honesty, aside from perhaps just under half of its tracks, this is not a disc I'll be returning to often, although other listeners may well not share in my overall sense of disappointment.

David Kidman