Only weeks after turning 17 in December, Muireann Bradley played an atmospherically lit solo spot on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. Born and bred in County Donegal, she sang the traditional blues song Candyman – taught to revivalists by the renowned gospel musician Reverend Gary Davis in the mid-20th century – with a light and frisky southern US accent, fingerpicking her guitar with playful dexterity. It’s the opening track of her debut album, which only came together when Covid-19 waylaid her interest in combat sports and forced her to hole up with her guitar. She posted videos of herself playing on YouTube, which led to a deal with respected US folk and indie label Tompkins Square.
Recorded in first or second takes, I Kept These Old Blues is unavoidably impressive. Bradley’s bright, limber vocals are clear and inviting, and when she leaps to higher intervals, there’s a thrill in hearing her land back in lower registers with acrobatic effortlessness. She plays around with high-pitched natural harmonics with similar ease, and they’re especially gorgeous in Police Dog Blues, as Bradley tells us: “All my life / I’ve been a travelling gal.”
In instrumentals such as Buck Dancer’s Choice, full of impressive rhythms and string-bends, and the swagger of Vestapol, the mood is one of machine-like elegance. It gets hard to shake the feeling that this is a first-class pastiche. But when Bradley pushes her style and voice slightly further – as she does showing hints of emotional depth on Delia (covered by Bob Dylan on 1993’s World Gone Wrong) – her future looks like one where her voice and her style could branch out in interesting ways.
Also out this month
Nick Hart and Tom Moore’s The Colour of Amber (Slow Worm Records) marries the dark, woody tones of Hart’s viol da gamba (an instrument more connected with renaissance and baroque music traditions) and Moore’s viola with songs from morris and travelling traditions. It’s solid, hearty, medieval fare, bringing old-fashioned warmth to the winter. Hirondelle (self-released) sees the Brothers Gillespie, classical group Trio Mythos and Provençal polyphonic trio feature Tant Que Li Siam bringing together Occitan and northern English folk in an intriguingly weird, traditional mix. The latter bring nicely tricksy vocal arrangements and percussion such as sagattes, the zarb and the daf to the album’s best tracks, La Roumanço de Pèire d’Aragoun and Ô Ventour. And folk duo Alula Down’s Sound Poems (Bandcamp) is a fascinating sound collage built from a community project with an Alzheimer’s Society Music and Memory Cafe. Samples of songs such as My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and Hiraeth meet with fractured memories and industrial drone.
• This article was updated on 12 January to clarify details in the release entitled Hirondelle.
