Bring The Tide In is an EP follow-up to Iona Lane‘s debut album, Hallival, one of KLOF Mag’s top albums of 2022. Iona is joined by Malin Lewis on fiddle and synth, Euan Burton on double bass and Lucy Farrell on backing vocals. It finds the Glasgow-based singer in a reflective mood with the EP’s landscape-themed imagery inspired by places with personal resonances.
It kicks off with Suilvan, a simple fingerpicked, breathily sung and fiddle-coloured number, the title referring to one of Scotland’s best-known and most easily identified mountains, lying in a remote area in the west of Sutherland and serving as a metaphor for a coming of age (“told my dad I’d climb that hill/That he said was too big for me when I was a girl/Twenty miles along my life it shows/How far into these boots I’ve grown”), and how the struggle (“A stowaway blister living in my boots”) makes you who you are (“Last stop before I turn around/Aches and pains are memories/But I’m still a child/Anchored by the cairn to the ground/And I’ve struggled to realise now/Struggle’s the reason I’m found”).
Mountains and childhood memories also serve as the backdrop for Great Stone, the line “Three hushed giants asleep” alluding to the Great Stone of Fourstones on the Lancashire/ Yorkshire border where Ional Lane and her brothers would play as she sings “From this height, I can see/All the colours and grooves of the hills in the sky… As I step to the top cars passing by/A world away, from when we played”), carrying a message of opening your eyes to things beyond your immediate horizon (“All the while, I have been/Enamoured by others, who have different colours and grooves of the hills in the sky”).
From mountains to waters with the lovely, crooned, slow-rumbling title track with its shruti box drone intro, a love song about human connection that took its first breath back in 2022 during a visit to the Isle of Rum and plays like Canute in reverse (“For you, I’ll bring the tide in”), again recalling childhood days in its mingling of being protected (“With you I’ve never known those storms/Where the fish hide and the boat masts howl and groan”) and loss (“Years pass, time plods on/Under those skies I don’t know where you’ve gone”).
It ends, Lane on fiddle with pulsing bass notes, back on the Moors, written as a commission for a short film called ‘Black Dog’ set in the Yorkshire Moors. Moors addresses mental health, the metaphorical landscape beckoning like the unknown future (“Out there the world it waits for me”) but how, while “the moors they swallow …heather strewn cobble like in a street/It trips me as I pass”, a sense of security in nature (“the cloud keeps me”) is a grounding.
Bring The Tide In is a rather lovely ebb-and-flow quartet of poignancy-tinged songs that serve as a reminder of Iona Lane’s luminescent talent and is hopefully an early signpost of a new album in the not-too-distant future.
Visit Iona’s website for upcoming dates: https://www.ionalane.com/
Pre-Order Bring The Tide In via Bandcamp: https://ionalane.bandcamp.com/album/bring-the-tide-in