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EMILY SMITH
A Day Like Today
Foot Stompin' CDFSR1716
A Day Like Today offers a familiar - perhaps over-familiar - line-up: female singer plus male accompanists. Hard to imagine the reverse arrangement, isn't it? Emily Smith is a singer and instrumentalist from the Scottish Borders who scooped the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician 2002 Award. Her vocal skills and expertise on accordion and piano are shown here to impressive effect. Her accompanists are likewise adept on guitar, fiddle and whistles of assorted sizes; but they haven't yet digested the ancient truth that Less Is More.
The opening track (it's also the title song) is a case in point. On such a slight and short song there's simply too much happening instrumentally, and on too many of the subsequent tracks there's an overmastering desire to impress by speed and complexity. Rigs O' Barley is another. Fiddler Jamie McClennan has fitted out Burns' verses with a new tune, in which the chorus vaults into an unrelated key. Clever, certainly, but it's hard to see the necessity.
Emily is no doubt grateful to have such talented chaps supporting her but it's significant that the most memorable tracks are those with the most spartan backing - Fair Helen Of Kirkconnel for instance, another venerable song given a new tune, this time one of Emily's own; or The Cruel Mother, effectively underscored by doomy synth and spooky fiddle. Best of all is Time Wears Awa', the only unaccompanied song on the album. Though described as traditional and traced back to Willie Scott's mother, it actually has a very literary tone but is none the worse for that. It has a sere, plaintive beauty to it, which Emily brings out to its fullest.
On the evidence of this CD, Emily is a singer of real promise and if she can get the lads to ease off the throttle a bit, she'll soon be a force to be reckoned with.
Raymond Greenoaken - January 2003
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Folk & Acoustic
