Rachel Sermanni – So It Turns
Self Released – 23 August 2019
Recorded three years ago, and arriving a further year on from Tied To The Moon, the Scottish folk-noir singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni’s third album opens with the six-minute Put Me In The River, one of several songs treating on desire and inspired by time spent at Samye Ling, a Buddhist monastery. The track incorporates wistful, watery acoustic guitar, keys and ethereal and rippling water effects backdropping double-tracked vocals as she sings about, essentially, being baptised anew and cleansed.
The soft warmth of See You with its background tinkles ups the pace to a rhythmic train wheels chug to a song, again written at the monastery, about “the process of coming to know, and wanting to see, someone who lives on the other side of the world”,the melody blossoming into new shapes midway in as she la la las her way to the end.
As the title suggests, the slow waltzing If I is an introspective number (again from the Samye Ling stay where she contemplated becoming a nun) that asks “If I let this go, would it set me free?” balanced by “if I came back to you would you show me how to control myself?”
The reflective mood continues on the breathily sung, acoustic backed Wish I Showed My Love which she describes as being informed by three moments, embracing a lover as a teenager unaware they were about to break-up, finding herself unable to express her feelings for a partner in later years and, touching on a different dimension of relationship, and an attendant metaphor, her feelings of seeing a tree being ripped from the ground (and screaming for its mother) in a Cambridge forest.
The activist note is sounded on the gospel-infused, bass and slow handclap backed What Can I Do, the lead single which, expanding into mandolin and distorted blue guitar, was written in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election and in the midst of the refugee crisis. In view of this and the preceding track, it’s probably pertinent to mention that part of its proceeds are being donated to Extinction Rebellion Scotland.
By way of a musical seismic shift, the upbeat Typical Homegirls takes on a somewhat jazzy swing as well as some twangy guitar song, the in part sexually charged lyrics inspired by one of the many sassy naked fictional female figures she sketches while on the road, allowing her to vent a side of herself that rarely find expression.
Accompanied by acoustic guitar with some distant double bass, percussive rumbles and wave-like cymbals, Come To You is a melancholic reflection on a failed relationship, the theme echoed in the water imagery and passing time of Namesake, actually written for the previous album and surfacing now in an evocative setting that enfolds echoey soaring vocals, impressionistic soundscape instrumentation with tinkling piano notes, upright bass and a wash of choral voices as thunderclouds close in at the end.
Tiger returns to the subject of desire, the ebbs and flows it can inculcate reflected in the arrangement that moves from a neurotic fingerpicked mood to a freewheeling jazz-infused percussive texture that recalls Joni Mitchell’s Hejira period.
It ends with the waltzing, lullabyingly sung resigned acceptance of the title track, which, underpinned by nervy repeated piano notes and sprinkled with barely-there drum frills and cymbal shimmers, she describes as the “sad sequel to See You”, fading out on solo early hours piano noodling.
A musically complex and nuanced work with emotions to match, this may not have the immediacy of its predecessor, but its contemplative air marks Sermanni’s passage from a musician to an artist.
UPCOMING TOUR-DATES
11th Sep – Aberdeen, The Blue Lamp
12th Sep – Inverness, Eden Court
13th Sep – Stirling, The Tollbooth
19th – 22nd Sep – Shetland (Songwriting Festival)
27th Sep – Galway, The Black Gate
28th Sep – Dublin, Lost Lane
2nd Oct – Album Launch – Glasgow, St Andrews in the Square
10th Oct – London, St Pancras Church
11th Oct – Husthwaite Village Hall
12th Oct – Bury, The Met
13th Oct – Kingskerswell Parish Church
19th Oct – Durham, The Old Launderette