Quinie: Forefowk, Thoughts Me assessment – gathering songs on horseback, this Scottish musician is alive with concepts | Music

Travellers’ songs sung in Scots are the main focus of Josie Vallely, a gutsy, Glasgow-based artist performing as Quinie (pronounced “q-why-nee”; “younger girl” within the Doric dialect), whose third album acknowledges ancestors watching over her. It contains conventional singers Lizzie Higgins, Jeannie Robertson and Sheila Stewart, whose rawness drones, speaks and soars over these 11 different tracks, mixing tunes from fiddles, Gaelic sean-nós singing, and canntaireachd (the vocal mimicry of pipe music).

Quinie collected these songs from folks utilizing a way that matches the album’s unusual, rustic temper: she rode her horse, Maisie, throughout Argyll (“you take note of all of your senses, have totally different conversations with folks and hook up with older methods of doing issues,” she writes within the liner notes of this journey; she’s additionally made a 15-minute movie). On Auld Horse, her spoken phrases ripple in opposition to area recordings of water, the fabulous double bass of Stevie Jones (Alasdair Roberts, Sounds of Yell) and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s rumbling viola. One other spoken phrase observe, Well being, Wealth a Yer Days, is warmed by handclaps and Oliver Pitt’s bouzouki.

Elsewhere, Quinie’s unfiltered, ripe singing voice resonates like a siren. It twists round Harry Górski-Brown’s pipes within the opening, viscous observe Col My Love (which warns of the risks of standing near the shoreline). It confronts, however by no means overpowers, the floating, nonetheless tones of the duduk (an Armenian oboe) in Sae Slight a Factor. Quinie’s cappellas are particularly highly effective: her tackle Matt Armour’s 1982 ballad, Generations of Change, is no-nonsense and shifting, wherein a grandmother recounts her father’s life, the “lang holidays” together with her grandchildren, and the way “the weak point of age makes room for the younger”. Alive with concepts, this document holds the previous like a cauldron, broiling bewitchingly.

Additionally out this month

Varo are Dublin-based musicians Lucie Azconaga and Consuelo Nerea Breschi, companions in life and music, who unite with many modern Irish lodestars on their terrific second album, The World That I Knew (self-released). Highlights embrace Skibbereen, a duet with Junior Brother, and an imposing Inexperienced Grows the Laurel with John Francis Flynn. The Light Good says goodbye to the dimly lit, acoustic remedies of 2023’s beautiful Galargan for washes of classic synths, distorted guitars and layered vocals on Elan (Bubblewrap). A heat, psychedelic portrait of a flooded valley in Powys, mid-Wales, its influences embrace Nineteenth-century ballads, RS Thomas’ poetry and, on the sunstruck To Be in Summer time, west coast pop. One other pleasure is Final Name, the ultimate album by folk-influenced singer and songwriter Steve Tilston, his voice as heat and spry as ever, his fingerpicking filling the title observe with electrical energy.