The Guardian
Folk Album of the Month
Yarrow Acoustic Sessions
Lori Watson
ISLE Music Scotland
4/5 stars
Rattling Keys and Rich New Worlds
Folk music thrives in the dark, be that in dedicated corners of music magazines or the fertile underbelly of the internet. Folk also prospers when the sun rarely shines, so it’s oddly fitting, in the season of Robbie Burns and winter wassails, that Scotland and its borders have inspired the best new releases this month. The standout among these is Lori Watson’s Yarrow Acoustic Sessions, the second record proper by the talented young singer, former Rule of Three fiddler, experimental composer and academic. Watson has stitched together poetry and traditional songs from the Yarrow border country where she grew up with her own piercing melodies, arrangements and effects. The results are rich, multi-layered and giving.
The album begins unusually: with a long, eerie breath, a sighing harmonium, then the full deep swell of that instrument alongside Watson’s heavily accented voice; and her adaptation of local woodcutter Walter Elliot’s poem, Yarrow (a charm), almost lifts off, as if it were announcing a new world. Field recordings, rattling keys and drones add unease to her beautiful vocals too, with Fine Floors in the Valley being the album’s knockout moment. Following the jolting poem The Sense of Being Lonely, Watson’s melody plunges you almost viscerally into the green leaves, the moonlight, and the story of a woman and her dead baby. A cover of the Incredible String Band’s October Song is a great choice, too.