Siobhan Miller – Bloom

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I have to confess that while appreciating her skills (and at odds with reviews in these pages), Siobhan Miller’s previous albums never really hooked me in. While again produced by Euan Burton and featuring many of the musicians with whom she’s previously worked, among them Kris Drever, Ian Carr, Louis Abbott and Eddi Reader, there seems to be more of an immediacy and energy to her fifth album ‘Bloom‘, possibly a reaction to shaking off the chains of lockdown.

A mix of traditional and covers, Bloom opens with her take on Queen Of Argyll, a Scots love song that, with fiddle by Jack Smedley, could be mistaken for traditional if you didn’t know it was written by Silly Wizard’s Andy M Stewart. Cold Blows The Rainy Night is a traditional folk song, a lively accordion-featured folk-rock reading of the night visiting song in which a soldier persuades a young maiden to take him to her bed out of the storm and does a runner after taking her virginity. The tempo slows for Davie Robertson’s Star O’ The Bar, written in Edinburgh dialect, as the narrator sings the praises of a lassie who may have been coarse, heartless and not that bonnie, but who could “sing a fine tune with you/Pass the glass ’round with you, drink herself blind”.

Go, Move, Shift originally featured in The Travelling People radio ballads (1964) under the title of The Moving On Song, written by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Here, it’s given a propulsive folk-rock arrangement, a song about how travelling folk are not welcomed (“The local people said to me/You’ll lower the price of property”). It is based on the story of Mindy Smith, moved on by the police while giving birth in her caravan,  parallels her experience with the nativity (“The wise men came so stern and strict/And brought the order to evict”), the more urgent song title is taken from a  line in the chorus.

A brace of traditionals follows it, the first being a suitably carousing version of I’m A Rover, another tale of rapping on a bedroom window on a wet and miserable night with much the same outcome, the other The Swan Swims being a guitar and piano-arranged variant on The Twae Sisters, the bones of the one murdered turned into a fiddle, a far lovelier sounding number than the subject matter would suggest.

The music adapted from a traditional pipe tune of the same name, Tom Gibbs’ piano remains to the fore for The Battle Of Waterloo, a brooding cover of Jim Malcolm’s 1998 song in which a soldier from Kirrie lies dying, cut down by French cannons, thinking of his true love and telling the surgeon to “Save your knife for others who will surely rise again”. There’s yet more piano, but of a lighter, jazzier note, on her cover of Rab Noakes’ let your hair down and party blues Open All Night, a number that sounds like a real live stormer. 

The feelgood mood continues for the fiddle waltzing Saturday Night by the Ayrshire-born, Juno-winning Canadian David Francey, a song about having a good night out with your best girl  (“Forget all your troubles at the foot of the stairs/Just pass on the perfume and turn out the lights”) from his 2001 album Far End Of Summer. It ends on a sublime note with a traditional evergreen, an understated, wistful reading of Wild Mountain Thyme with Kris Drever and Eddi Reader on backing and Charlie Stewart on mournful fiddle, perfectly showcasing the purity of Miller’s voice without preserving it in amber. If she can continue to harness the spark, energy and spontaneity in evidence here, I’ll remain a convert. A prize bloom indeed.

Upcoming Dates

September 24th – Tolbooth – Stirling

September 26th – Junction – Cambridge

September 29th – Kings Place – London

October 4th – Liverpool Philharmonic – Liverpool

Website: www.siobhanmiller.com