Karine Polwart
Album: Traces
Label: Hegri
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.karinepolwart.com

Karine's last pair of full-length albums, released around four years ago, matched, compared and contrasted her traditional and contemporary sensibilities in turn, since which we've been treated to a marvellous DVD that afforded us insights into her personality while the public side of her musical activities has largely been channelled into her work with the Burns Unit. Privately, however, Karine's obviously been hard at work writing the songs that have finally surfaced on Traces, a thought-provoking collection which she typically considers an exploration of love in all its aspects (not necessarily the obvious romantic ones), but turns out to be every bit as much shot through with matters of death, mortality and collective memory embodying a vivid sense of place and time.

Karine's evocative singing here bravely voices her reactions to the deaths of loved ones - her cousin Ewan (Strange News), a neighbour and close friend (Salter's Road) - and a stranger (Susan Maxwell) with whom Karine herself felt a close kinship (Half A Mile). She also reflects tellingly on the traces of our lives that are etched into our homes themselves (Sticks 'n' Stones), and with some degree of loving wistfulness on views from her childhood home (Tinsel Show), while We're All Leaving is a by-product of Karine's writing partnership with Dave Gunning as part of the Darwin Song Project. I struggle a little to find a connection between any concept of love and Karine's exposé of the evils of the Trump Corporation (Cover Your Eyes), however…

The whole album has a special, if slightly opaque ambience and subtly atmospheric sonic identity, whereby Karine and her band (the core team of brother Steven with Inge Thomson, here augmented by Iain Cook and Sarah Hayes) are cocooned by an ambitious, unusually layered soundscape conjured by Iain himself, one that closely parallels the often enigmatic nature of Karine's lyric poetry yet at times emerges a touch too homogeneously, obscuring the impact of her carefully conceived poetic images. In other words, this album requires significant effort on the part of the listener.

But Traces will still be seen as an important body of work, a thoroughly contemporary album shot through with the present-day preoccupations of our ever-changing times; it may not always be as easy listening as some of Karine's earlier albums, but it will doubtless prove an increasingly satisfying experience on repeated acquaintance.

David Kidman