Hannah Rarity: ’Neath the Gloaming

The current Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year’s much-anticipated debut album showcases her crystal-clear delivery of traditional or contemporary folk material, plus a couple of her own compositions. Her voice soars right from the opening Moon Shined on

my Bed Last Night (although it doesn’t really need those drums), and there’s a steady drive to the album’s title song, an Aberdeenshire pastoral romance.

Rarity can tell a tale with dramatic articulation, even in more up-tempo numbers such as the witch ballad

Alison Cross. She’s at her unadorned best, however, in Lady Nairne’s timelessly beautiful Land o’ the Leal (delivered with poise and delicacy and with gently restrained piano and fiddle from John Lowrie and Sally Simpson), the lovely Braw Sailin’ on

the Sea and Hallowe’en, Violet Jacob’s heartbreaking evocation of rural ghosts and guisers that coalesces into a lament for her war-dead son.

Jim Gilchrist