As rising mainstream folk stars go, Rowan Rheingans cuts a bold figure. This year, she followed the first run of her one-woman show Dispatches on the Red Dress (which is currently at the Edinburgh festival until 26 August) with talks that included Holocaust education campaigners and anti-racism activists. The Lines We Draw Together, Rheingans’ first album solo away from her sister Anna, with whom she has bagged BBC Radio 2 Folk awards and sundry nominations, is similarly full of songs inspired by her grandmother’s childhood in 1940s Germany. At a distant listen, it is immediate and pretty, as many often-nominated Radio 2 Folk award works are.
But as its delicate sound twists apart in woodwind-textured arrangements, its narrative starts to break through. “We always look skyward to see what is coming,” begins What Birds Are. “And then without warning the Earth begins moving.”
From within Rheingans’ comforting musical landscape, coddled by her warm-as-broth Derbyshire vocal, the air “becomes thick with the dust of the war”. Bright yellow stars move from horizons on to young men’s lapels; people stop talking “to quiet the din”. Such cautions often feel obvious, but they are strangely powerful in this soft context.
Sky is among the album’s most moving songs, based on a 1943 diary entry by the Dutch writer Etty Hillesum, not long before she died in Auschwitz: “the rare metal of birdsong” is a particularly muscular line. Similar jolts happen when static is used as crackling percussion on Brave, and when Jack McNeill’s clarinet quietly unspools at the end of Traces, like a lost moment from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock. Even more moments of disruption would be welcome, but as this is an album about the slow creep and acceptance of extremism, its subtle message is clear. So is Rheingans’ ambition, which is to be celebrated.
Also out this month
Charlie Parr’s eponymous debut is roaring American folk-blues with its plaid shirt plastered on. A charismatic voice and bright finger-picking raise it above cliches, the latter well done given Parr shattered his shoulder last year, and needed eight pins to fix it. Martin Simpson’s double album Rooted snaps lustily with songs about nature, history and mental health, performed with folk stalwarts (including Nancy Kerr and John Smith) and Simpson’s neighbour Richard Hawley. Alison O’Donnell’s Exotic Masks and Sensible Shoes is also a great Bandcamp find, featuring the Mellow Candle and United Bible Studies acid-folk singer as she turns into a woozier Dory Previn.
